Clinical Research in Cardiovascular Disease using Metabolomics

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) comprises a group of complex diseases and remains one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Although traditional risk factors such as lifestyle, cholesterol, glucose and hypertension parameters represent the major markers of CVD, there is still a need for more specific markers for CVD risk assessment, patient stratification for treatment, and to study disease mechanisms. Metabolomics and metabolic phenotyping studies are becoming widespread across biomedical research fields. They have proven to be particularly useful in CVD research, namely human case-control studies, pre-clinical animal studies, drug or nutritional intervention studies and in large scale epidemiologic studies. The current chapter aims at describing the current state-of-the-art of metabolomics and metabolic phenotyping applied to CVD research and how the major findings and data can be translated into clinical practice.