Phenylalanine is the key indicator for distinguishing the stroke subtypes of AIS and ICH

Stroke is a complex neurological disease that involves a sudden abnormality in brain function, including acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). The clinical symptoms of them are similar, but the treatment strategies are completely opposite, and there is no clear biomarker to distinguish them for clinical use. Our purpose is to investigate the plasma metabolites and find out potential biomarkers that can discriminate ICH from AIS. Herein, we used non-targeted metabolomics analysis by GC/MS to investigate the changes in metabolites in plasma samples from 63 AIS patients, 35 ICH patients and 65 healthy people. More than 50 metabolites were analyzed, then the Orthogonal partial least squares discrimination analysis (OPLS-DA) model and Support Vector Machine algorithm were used to analyze these metabolites. The results showed that the area under curve of L-phenylalanine is as high as 0.961 and 93.86% of samples could be correctly diagnosed with 88.89% sensitivity and 100% specificity. The content of phenylalanine in the plasma of AIS patients was significantly higher than that of ICH patients and healthy people, and there was no difference in the content of phenylalanine between ICH patients and healthy people. Therefore , phenyalanine may be a potential biomarker for differentiating AIS from ICH