Although many diagnostic criteria of Behcet's disease (BD) have been developed and revised by experts, diagnosing BD is still complicated and challenging. No metabolomic studies on serum have been attempted to improve the diagnosis and to identify potential biomarkers of BD. The purposes of this study were to investigate distinctive metabolic changes in serum samples of BD patients and to identify metabolic candidate biomarkers for reliable diagnosis of BD using the metabolomics platform.

Metabolomic profiling of 90 serum samples from 45 BD patients and 45 healthy controls (HCs) were performed via gas chromatography with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC/TOF-MS) with multivariate statistical analyses.

A total of 104 metabolites were identified from samples. The serum metabolite profiles obtained from GC/TOF-MS analysis can distinguish BD patients from HC group in discovery set. The variation values of the partial least squared-discrimination analysis (PLS-DA) model are R²X of 0.246, R²Y of 0.913 and Q² of 0.852, respectively, indicating strong explanation and prediction capabilities of the model. A panel of five metabolic biomarkers, namely, decanoic acid, fructose, tagatose, linoleic acid and oleic acid were selected and adequately validated as putative biomarkers of BD (sensitivity 100%, specificity 97.1%, area under the curve 0.998) in the discovery set and independent set. The PLS_DA model showed clear discrimination of BD and HC groups by the five metabolic biomarkers in independent set.

This is the first report on characteristic metabolic profiles and potential metabolite biomarkers in serum for reliable diagnosis of BD using GC/TOF-MS.