Chronic unpredictable mild stress affects myocardial metabolic profiling of SD rats

Depression is frequently comorbid with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), but a full understanding of the mechanisms is still on its way. Chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) model is a commonly used model to mimic clinical depression, here we present a GC/MS-based metabolic profiling approach to investigate myocardial metabolic changes of CUMS SD rats. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) were utilized to reveal differences between the model and control group. This study found that molecules proved cardioprotective involving glutamine (P = 0.019) and inosine (P = 0.013), fatty acid (9,12-octadecadienoic acid, P = 0.002; hexadecanoic acid, P = 0.006; octadecanoic acid, P = 0.030) which serve as the major energy source of heart and collagen molecule precursor proline (P = 0.036) had down-regulated in CUMS model group.