Silent myocardial ischemia is associated with altered plasma phospholipids.

Timely and accurate confirmation of the occurrence of silent myocardial ischemia (SMI) is critical both for prevention and therapy management. Metabolomics assay may offer an alternative for SMI differentiation and altered biomolecule discovery in addition to traditional measures. In this study, plasma samples were obtained from 14 diagnosed SMI subjects and 25 healthy controls and analyzed by liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry in view of metabolomics. Obtained data were subjected to orthogonal signal correction partial least-squares discriminate analysis. Multi-variate statistic analysis indicated a clear separation between the two studied groups. Plasma concentration fluctuation of four kinds of phospholipids showed tight relationship with the occurrence of SMI, among which 1-linoleoylglycerophosphocholine (C18:2) was decreased statistically in SMI population (P=0.01). The plasma phospholipids' changes were before enzymatic alteration in SMI, which might be a useful complementary reference to facilitate SMI diagnosis. Copyright 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.