As the number of people with dementia grows, it becomes even more important to improve how it is diagnosed and treated. Metabolomics, the study of small molecule metabolites in biological systems, helps us learn a lot about dementia by revealing changes in the brain’s systems through blood plasma research.

The objective of this study is to clarify the changes in metabolism that are linked to dementia. This will be achieved by using metabolic fingerprinting techniques on human plasma to differentiate between patients with dementia and individuals who have normal cognitive function.

This study used data from the Birjand Longitudinal Aging Study and high-tech Raman Spectroscopy, as well as multivariate statistical methods such as PCA and OPLS-DA. The study looked at 34 people with dementia and 34 people who did not have any cognitive damage.

Metabolic fingerprints distinguished two groups with extremely distinct metabolic characteristics. Main findings demonstrate that oxidative stress and energy metabolism metabolites have changed significantly. OPLS-DA distinguished healthy and dementia samples with high accuracy and sensitivity. Both the expected high model accuracy and the clear score plot split confirmed this.