Metabolomics insights into Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease: toward biomarker discovery

Introduction: Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease (CMT) is a group of rare neuropathies but still the most common hereditary neuromuscular disorder with heterogeneous phenotype and usually slow progression. Currently, there are no approved treatments or validated biomarkers for sensitive monitoring of disease progression. Objectives: This study aimed to analyse selected plasma metabolite concentrations in a CMT cohort and compare them to healthy controls. For this purpose, 84 patients and 34 controls were enrolled in the study. Results: We detected a total of 33 metabolites from which acetylcarnitine was found elevated and glycine was found decreased in CMT patients. In addition, the CMTX1 subgroup has decreased valine levels compared to controls. However, further analysis revealed poor disease predictive abilities of the detected metabolites for any CMT group. Furthermore, we found no associations of these metabolites with CMT severity. Conclusion: Our study data provide information about plasma metabolite levels in CMT patients. However, these findings suggest that the metabolites mentioned above might be unspecific biomarkers of neuropathy and do not reflect disease severity.