Metabolomics approach to evaluation of plateau hypoxia / 中草药

ABSTRACT

Under plateau environment, inadequate oxygen makes people breathe less oxygen, reducing the level of oxygen metabolism and energy supply in the body. Subsequently, the peripheral circulation, the contractile efficiency of myocardial cells, the pump of blood stream, the flow rate of blood in various tissues, and the excretion rate of waste in the body could be greatly reduced, which are key reasons for causing plateau disease. Due to the reason that many metabolic pathways are affected in vivo, the level of endogenous small molecular metabolites can also be changed greatly. Therefore, metabolomics has been gradually applied to the study of plateau diseases, pathogenesis and even pharmacodynamics. This article summarizes the pathogenesis of plateau hypoxia and metabolomics of the associated therapeutic agents based on the preclinical and clinical research reviewed from the altitude sickness-associated metabolic research literature at home and abroad. Previous studies have confirmed that the endogenous metabolites and metabolic pathways altered significantly under plateau hypoxia, and some drugs showed a certain regulatory effect on the pathway metabolism. Moreover, the article summarizes the problems existing in the application of metabolomics in plateau hypoxia disease and the prospect of its future application. It was suggested that metabolomics was a promising tool for the study on the mechanism and the primary assessment of candidate drugs for plateau disease.