Frontiers in Nutrition (Jun 2023)

Plasma lipidomic profiling of thiopurine-induced leukopenia after NUDT15 genotype-guided dosing in Chinese IBD patients

  • Pan Li,
  • Kang Chao,
  • Kang Chao,
  • Zhanhua Hu,
  • Lulu Qin,
  • Ting Yang,
  • Jing Mao,
  • Xia Zhu,
  • Xia Zhu,
  • Xia Zhu,
  • Pinjin Hu,
  • Pinjin Hu,
  • Xueding Wang,
  • Xiang Gao,
  • Xiang Gao,
  • Min Huang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2023.1138506
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

Read online

IntroductionThiopurines, azathiopurine (AZA) and mercaptopurine (6-MP) have been regularly used in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Despite optimized dosage adjustment based on the NUDT15 genotypes, some patients still discontinue or change treatment regimens due to thiopurine-induced leukopenia.MethodsWe proposed a prospective observational study of lipidomics to reveal the lipids perturbations associated with thiopurine-induced leukopenia. One hundred and twenty-seven IBD participants treated with thiopurine were enrolled, twenty-seven of which have developed thiopurine-induced leucopenia. Plasma lipid profiles were measured using Ultra-High-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Q-Exactive. Lipidomic alterations were validated with an independent validation cohort (leukopenia n = 26, non-leukopenia n = 74).ResultsUsing univariate and multivariate analysis, there were 16 lipid species from four lipid classes, triglyceride (n = 11), sphingomyelin (n = 1), phosphatidylcholine (n = 1) and lactosylceramide (n = 3) identified. Based on machine learning feature reduction and variable screening strategies, the random forest algorithm established by six lipids showed an excellent performance to distinguish the leukopenia group from the normal group, with a model accuracy of 95.28% (discovery cohort), 79.00% (validation cohort) and an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.9989 (discovery cohort), 0.8098 (validation cohort).DiscussionOur novel findings suggested that lipidomic provided unique insights into formulating individualized medication strategies for thiopurines in IBD patients.

Keywords