Chinese researchers have discovered a group of new serum metabolite biomarkers with high sensitivity in early-stage detection of diabetic retinopathy (DR).

DR is one of the common and severe microvascular complications in diabetes that can cause loss of vision or blindness among adults.

The lack of effective diagnostic biomarkers for DR leads to unsatisfactory curative treatments.

Researchers from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, recruited a total of 905 diabetic patients as subjects, with and without DR, at different clinical stages and used multi-platform metabolomics to define potential metabolite biomarkers for DR diagnosis.

They found that 290 metabolites were significantly associated with the pathogenesis of early DR. The newly-found biomarker panel exhibited better diagnostic performance with up to 93.3 percent specificity and almost 93 percent sensitivity in early‐stage DR detection.

The study provided reliable and efficient method for blood detection of early-stage DR. Enditem