Metabolomic profile of colorectal cancer patients and its clinical implications

Background: Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is a great public health issue and the outcomes of treatment depends on early diagnosis. Metabolomics may provide biomarkers for early diagnosis, staging, prognosis and follow-up. Methods: The authors searched for the results of the published studies existing in medical databases (PubMed) for all the changes in the main metabolic pathways (carbohydrate, lipid, aminoacid, nucleotide and other important metabolites) of the CRC patients and how the metabolic changes can be used as biomarkers, for tumor staging, prognosis and follow-up. Results: While most of the metabolites values in biological fluids or tissue samples are modified (either increased or decreased) and the results are usually constant across the studies it seems that only patterns of metabolites (fingerprints of 5, 15 or even 30 metabolites) can be used for the regarding issues mentioned above. Conclusion: Some studies conclude that some metabolomic models are statistically much better than current existing markers and may become screening methods in the near future.