Prevention & lipidsCross-sectional study

Metabolomic Atlas of Cardiovascular Diseases

JACC AdvPublished

  • cross-sectional metabolite-disease associations
  • nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomic data (325 metabolites)
  • Logistic regression, random forest, and XGBoost models
  • SHapley Additive exPlanations analysis
  • Internal geographic validation used Scotland and Wales cohorts

Authors' conclusion

This comprehensive metabolomic atlas reveals both shared and subtype-specific metabolic alterations across prevalent CVD. The identified metabolite set provides a hypothesis-generating framework for understanding cardiovascular metabolic heterogeneity. However, the cross-sectional design and inclusion of treated patients preclude causal or predictive inference, requiring validation in prospective, treatment-naive cohorts.

Study context

Population
UK Biobank participants, including those with prevalent cardiovascular disease (CVDs) classified into 87 phenotypes (37 classes, 50 subclasses) using International Classification of Diseases-10th Revision codesUK Biobank participants, including 27,950 with prevalent CVDs
Participants
244,567 participants

Main finding

As reported in the abstract

Metabolites consistently associated with multiple conditions

Metabolites consistently associated with multiple conditions, including Intermediate-Density Lipoprotein cholesteryl esters, linoleic acid percentage, and small very low_density lipoprotein particles

21

Observational data: associations, not effects.

Further findings

Cross-sectional discrimination of prevalent disease status

chronic ischemic heart disease area under the curve
0.876
moderate-to-high performance for prevalent disease status

Disease similarity clustering

ischemic entities formed tight clusters, hypertensive-renal diseases showed graded patterns, while rheumatic and pulmonary conditions remained distinct
  • These patterns were confirmed in geographic validation cohorts.

Original publication

Metabolomic Atlas of Cardiovascular Diseases. JACC Adv. Published 17 April 2026. doi:10.1016/j.jacadv.2026.102742

Summarised from the published abstract; every number is checked against it