Integrated Metabolomics Identifies Mitochondrial Dysfunction, Oxidative Membrane Remodeling, and Reduced Lipophilic Antioxidant Defenses in First-Episode Simple Dysmood Disorder

In first-episode simple dysmood disorder, a consensus panel of 20 plasma metabolites discriminates patients from 44 healthy controls across multivariate and machine-learning analyses.

• Why it matters: Major depression metabolomics has often focused on single biomarkers, leaving unclear whether coordinated pathways better characterize early, first-episode dysmood disorder and its clinical links.
• What they did: Using untargeted LC-MS on plasma from 44 FE-SDMD patients and 44 controls, the team applied Wilcoxon tests with FDR correction, fold-change filtering, and integrated machine-learning feature selection.
• The result: Six functional modules showed oxidative membrane remodeling, gut-liver and mitochondrial dysfunction, reduced lipophilic antioxidant defenses, and glucocorticoid/dietary phytochemical shifts, with ACEs (especially emotional neglect) and NLEs linked to broader module abnormalities.

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