Dengue virus infection in children: Serum lipidomics profiling for biomarker discovery

Dengue fever is a significant global health concern, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions, where it disproportionately affects children and adolescents. The disease, caused by the dengue virus (DENV), triggers a complex immune response that leads to metabolic alterations, particularly in lipid metabolism, which plays a key role in inflammation and disease progression. Despite advancements in diagnostic methods, the search for novel biomarkers may support the development of new diagnostic tools for faster patient screening. In this study, we applied a lipidomics approach using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze the serum lipid metabolome of children and adolescents infected with DENV (n = 25) compared to controls (n = 15). Multivariate statistics included partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) to assess group separation and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis to evaluate biomarker performance. The PLS-DA revealed a tendency of separation between groups, with component 5 showing the highest predictive power (Q2 = 0.68345). From this data, 12 metabolites were significantly more abundant in controls, while 3 were more abundant in DENV infected group. ROC curve analysis demonstrated a sensitivity of 80% for the metabolite of m/z 246.265, and a sensitivity of 96% for all metabolites, as a set. The metabolites were attributed to sphingolipids, fatty acids, glycerol lipids, and sterols. Our findings reveal significant lipid metabolic alterations in pediatric dengue fever, highlighting their biomarker potential. This study reinforces the value of lipidomics in dengue research and biomarker discovery, which may contribute to the development of diagnosis tools that will improve patient care.