posted on 2019-06-10, 08:47authored byRT Souza, J Mayrink, DF Leite, ML Costa, IM Calderon, EA Rocha Filho, J Vettorazzi, FE Feitosa, JG Cecatti, Preterm SAMBA Study Group
The prediction or early diagnosis of maternal complications is challenging mostly because the main conditions, such as preeclampsia, preterm birth, fetal growth restriction, and gestational diabetes mellitus, are complex syndromes with multiple underlying mechanisms related to their occurrence. Limited advances in maternal and perinatal health in recent decades with respect to preventing these disorders have led to new approaches, and "omics" sciences have emerged as a potential field to be explored. Metabolomics is the study of a set of metabolites in a given sample and can represent the metabolic functioning of a cell, tissue or organism. Metabolomics has some advantages over genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, as metabolites are the final result of the interactions of genes, RNAs and proteins. Considering the recent "boom" in metabolomic studies and their importance in the research agenda, we here review the topic, explaining the rationale and theory of the metabolomic approach in different areas of maternal and perinatal health research for clinical practitioners. We also demonstrate the main exploratory studies of these maternal complications, commenting on their promising findings. The potential translational application of metabolomic studies, especially for the identification of predictive biomarkers, is supported by the current findings, although they require external validation in larger datasets and with alternative methodologies.
Funding
This review is part of the scope of the Preterm SAMBA Study
Group, which is an initiative to investigate metabolomic approaches
in maternal and perinatal health. The Preterm SAMBA Study
Group was jointly funded by The Brazilian National Research
Council (CNPq) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Award
401636/2013-5, Grand Challenges Brazil: Reducing the burden of
PTB). RTS and DFL have been awarded Ph.D. scholarships from
the CAPES Foundation, an agency under the Ministry of Education
of Brazil, process 88881.134095/2016-01 and 8881.134512/2016-
01, respectively.