A Pilot Study on Plasma Iipidomic Profile of Giant Pulmonary Bulla

Background: The symptom of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and giant pulmonary bulla (GPB) also called giant emphysematous bulla (GEB) is too similar to distinguish, and the treatment of the two diseases are completely different because of the different pathology. We investigated the plasma lipid profiles from patients of COPD and GPB to find targeted lipid changes responsible for differentiation between two diseases. Methods: : Plasma was collected from 9 patients with COPD, and 10 patients with COPD and GPB. Extracted lipids were analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography-triple quadrupole mass spectrometry (HPLC-QqQ-MS) to characterize lipid profiles. Principal components analysis (PCA), orthogonal projection to latent structures-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and variable importance in projection (VIP) scores were used to estimate the importance of each lipid variable. Results: : The HPLC-QqQ-MS method identified 582 kinds of lipids at negative mode, and 577 kinds of lipids at positive mode. Lipid profiles were significantly different between COPD and GPB. Principal discriminant phospholipids between COPD and GPB were LPC(16:1)+AcO, LPC(16:0)+AcO, LPC(18:2)+AcO, LPC(18:1)+AcO, PC(16:0/22:5)+AcO, PC(18:2/18:2)+AcO, LPE(18:0)-H, LPE(16:0)-H, LPE(18:2)-H, PE(18:1/18:2)-H and FFA(24:0)(GPB group were significantly decreased compared to COPD group, VIP>1 and P<0.05 ). Conclusions: : Our study provides insights into the alteration of the plasma lipid profile of GPB patients, commonly resulting from COPD, that may lead to improved GPB treatment and differentiation of this disease from COPD. Furthermore, LPC (16:0) +AcO was found to have a high potential to be a possible biomarker to distinguish the two diseases.