Citation

González-Domínguez R. EBioMedicine 2016; 12: 8-9.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.09.024

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex disorder with variable etiology and severity that nowadays stands as a major cause of death and disability worldwide, principally among children and young people. Despite the implementation of intensive care strategies at early stages following the injury, long-term morbidity of severe TBI still remains high, and many patients may show significant neurologic sequelae even after recovery, which usually persist for years. For this reason, there is a critical need to get a deeper insight into pathological mechanisms occurring in brain after trauma and discover potential biomarkers that could help in diagnosis, staging disease severity, monitoring disease progression, the identification of complications, as well as the development of better strategies for treatment and rehabilitation after injury. TBI pathology begins with a mechanical brain damage, which is followed by complex and dynamic perturbations in multiple molecular pathways in glia and neurons. Thus, holistic approaches such as metabolomics stand out as suitable tools for characterizing these metabolic alterations. Metabolomics can be defined as the comprehensive study of the entire set of metabolites from a cell, tissue, organ, body fluid or organism at a specific time, as well as of the metabolic changes observed in response to a genetic or environmental perturbation. However, only a few authors have previously reported the application of metabolomic techniques for investigating TBI pathogenesis, usually by employing nuclear magnetic resonance (1H-NMR) to study the brain and blood metabolome from different animal models (Viant et al., 2005, Bahado-Singh et al., 2016a and Bahado-Singh et al., 2016b). Thereby, it was demonstrated that numerous significant disturbances in TBI might be associated with oxidative stress, membrane disruption, failures in energy metabolism and neuronal injury, among other pathological processes...

Language: en