The diagnosis of osteoporosis is mainly based on clinical examination and bone mineral density assessments. The present pilot study compares the plasma lipid and polar metabolite profiles in blood plasma of 95 Singaporean-Chinese (SC) menopausal women with normal and low bone mineral density (BMD) using an untargeted metabolomic approach. The primary finding of this study was the association between lipids and femoral neck BMD in SC menopausal women. Twelve lipids were identified to be associated with low BMD by the orthogonal partial least squares (OPLS) model. Plasma concentrations of eight glycerophospholipid, glycerolipid, and sphingolipid species were significantly lower in menopausal women with low BMD but higher in two glycerophospholipid species (phosphatidylinositol and phosphatidic acid). Further, this study found no significant differences in plasma amino acid metabolites. However, trends for lower 4-aminobutyric acid, turanose, proline, aminopropionitrile, threonine, and methionine were found in women with low BMD. This pilot study identified associations between lipid metabolism and femoral neck BMD in SC women. Further studies are required on larger populations for evaluating the bone health effect of these compounds and their usefulness as clinical biomarkers for osteoporosis prediction in women.
Keywords: biomarkers; lipidomics; menopause; metabolomics; osteoporosis.