Background: Clinical outcomes of bladder cancer (BC) are tightly associated with the stage and grade of the initial diagnosis of BC because early detection is clearly important for patients with BC. However, the diagnostic capability of current detection methods, such as urinary cytology, cystoscopy, imageology method, and several urine-based tests, is inadequate for early detection of BC. The objective of our study is to discover novel biomarkers for detecting BC at an early stage, called non-muscle invasive (NMI) BC, using liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS)-based metabolomics. Methods: First, morning midstream urine samples were collected from healthy adult and NMIBC patients. The LC-HRMS-based metabolomics were applied to distinguish the NMIBC group without hematuria from the controls (gender- and age-matched volunteers with normal clinically healthy index), low-grade NMIBC from the controls, and high-grade from low-grade NMIBC. Results: A total of 284 subjects were enrolled in our study including 117 healthy adults, 80 NMIBC patients without hematuria, and 87 NMIBC patients with hematuria. The metabolite panel including dopamine 4-sulfate, MG00/1846Z,9Z,12Z,15Z/00, aspartyl-histidine, and tyrosyl-methionine was found in a discovery set, which showed the predictive ability to distinguish the NMIBC group from the control group with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.838 in an external validation set. The AUC of the panel for low-grade NMIBC samples, which consisted of 3-hydroxy-cis-5-tetradecenoylcarnitine, 6-ketoestriol, beta-cortolone, tetrahydrocorticosterone, and heptylmalonic acid, was 0.899. The sensitivity and specificity were 0.881 and 0.786, respectively. The AUC of the panel for distinction of low-grade NMIBC with and without hematuria against high-grade NMIBC with and without hematuria were 0.827 and 0.755, respectively. In addition, metabolites involved in tryptophan metabolism were upregulated in the urine of high-grade NMIBC patients when compared with low-grade NMIBC patients with the presence or absence of hematuria. Conclusion: The NMIBC urine metabolic profiling was able to assist in the early detection of BC. Panels of metabolites were discovered to have a potential value for high-grade NMIBC and low-grade NMIBC diagnosis as well as for NMIBC grading distinction.
Keywords: biomarker; bladder cancer; early detection; metabolomics; non-muscle invasive.