Separating Human Serums of Health and Hyperlipidaemia Subjects Using Diffusion-weighted Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

It is demonstrated that the combination of diffusion-weighted NMR spectroscopy and principle components analysis (PCA) can be used to differentiate serums of coronary heart disease (CHD) patients from those of health subjects. Diffusion-weighted 1H NMR spectroscopy is a powerful approach for enhancing resonances from large molecules and suppressing resonances of low molecular-weight metabolites without disturbing the physiological properties of the serum samples. The best diffusion weighting factor is found to be around b = 0.85 × 107 s cm−2, and increasing or decreasing the diffusion weighting factor will destruct the discrimination efficiency. The preliminary results show that high density and low density lipoproteins (HDL & LDL) are the key components contributed to the discrimination, while small molecular-weight metabolites (such as lactate, etc.) and larger lipoproteins (such as very low density lipoproteins, VLDL, etc.) have lesser effects.