The potential biomarker panels for identification of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) patients with and without early life stress (ELS) by metabonomic analysis.

Objective: The lack of the disease biomarker to support objective laboratory tests still constitutes a bottleneck in the clinical diagnosis and evaluation of major depressive disorder (MDD) and its subtypes. We used metabonomic techniques to screen the diagnostic biomarker panels from the plasma of MDD patients with and without early life stress (ELS) experience.

Methods: Plasma samples were collected from 25 healthy adults and 46 patients with MDD, including 23 patients with ELS and 23 patients without ELS. Furthermore, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) coupled with multivariate statistical analysis was used to identify the differences in global plasma metabolites among the 3 groups.

Results: The distinctive metabolic profiles exist either between healthy subjects and MDD patients or between the MDD patients with ELS experience (ELS/MDD patients) and the MDD patients without it (non-ELS/MDD patients), and some diagnostic panels of feature metabolites' combination have higher predictive potential than the diagnostic panels of differential metabolites.

Conclusions: These findings in this study have high potential of being used as novel laboratory diagnostic tool for MDD patients and it with ELS or not in clinical application.