Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid from COPD Patients Reveals More Compounds Associated with Disease than Matched Plasma.

Smoking causes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Though recent studies identified a COPD metabolomic signature in blood, no large studies examine the metabolome in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid, a more direct representation of lung cell metabolism. We performed untargeted liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) on BAL and matched plasma from 115 subjects from the SPIROMICS cohort.