Metabolomics reveals LysoPC a C17:0 (LPC 17:0) as candidate biomarker for personalized medicine in morbid obesity

Morbid obesity represents the most severe form of obesity and is associated with increased cardiometabolic risk, including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular complications. Current diagnostic approaches rely on anthropometric measures, failing to capture the metabolic heterogeneity among patients. In this study, plasma samples from 20 morbidly obese patients and 8 controls were analyzed using targeted metabolomics. Of 188 quantified metabolites, 139 passed quality control across lipid, amino acid, and acylcarnitine families. Applying a novel normalization strategy, LPC 17:0 emerged as the most consistent discriminative biomarker, achieving 78% accuracy in distinguishing patients from controls. PC O-40:1, selected as the concomitant within the phosphatidylcholine family based on statistical performance, also showed promise, notable for its abundance in heart and liver tissue and its proposed antioxidant role. The difference between predicted and actual LPC 17:0 levels correlated negatively with BMI (r ≈ −0.6), highlighting its value as a marker of obesity severity. While combining LPC 17:0 with other metabolites slightly improved classification, the metabolite alone demonstrated strong discriminative power. These findings introduce a novel biomarker for morbid obesity and support the development of personalized medicine approaches, enabling monitoring of disease progression, improved risk stratification and targeted therapeutic interventions.