A meta-analysis of endometrial cancer metabolites as potential non-invasive biomarkers

Endometrial Cancer (EC) is the most prevalent gynecological cancer in the United States and causes tens of thousands of deaths. Despite its massive negative impact in developed countries, there currently is no reliable screening tool used to diagnose women. Due to this urgent need for minimally invasive and precise techniques to diagnose this malignancy, the metabolomics field has been at the forefront of current research. An untargeted mass-spectrometry approach is used by many researchers to form an initial hypothesis as to which metabolites are key in identifying EC cases. However, there are sometimes inconsistencies between studies. A meta-analysis approach examines multiple similar studies to determine which metabolites are consistently identified as a potential biomarker. To date, a meta-analysis has not been conducted on EC metabolomic studies. The aim of the present study is to compare similar studies to provide a meta-analysis of the key metabolites found across the literature to better understand what key metabolites studies agree on. Our study follows the PRISMA procedure for meta-analyses data gathering. The Amanida method was used to analyze the studies based on study size, fold change, and p-value of each metabolite per study. Three EC studies were evaluated for this meta-analysis. The results of this study may help future researchers form hypotheses regarding metabolites that are universally found in studies and perhaps aid in targeted mass-spectrometry. Our results found eight significant metabolites with proline and stearic acid upregulated and phenylpyruvic acid, Propylene glycol, Glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate, diphosphate, urea, and lactic acid down regulated. This study may provide a foundation for future metabolomics research in targeted GC-MS and LC-MS studies and developing potential diagnostic endpoints of endometrial cancer.