The use of untargeted and widely targeted metabolomics to distinguish between asphyxia and sudden cardiac death as the cause of death in rats: A preliminary study

It is important to determine the cause of death in the case of asphyxia. However, it is difficult to conclude death by asphyxia, especially when the deceased has underlying heart disease, because there are often no specific and representative corpse signs for both asphyxia and sudden cardiac death (SCD). The aim of the present work was to investigate the potential of metabolomics to discriminate asphyxia from SCD as the cause of death. A total of thirty male Sprague-Dawley rats were used to construct models of asphyxia, SCD (interfering cause of death), and cervical dis-location (control). Untargeted and widely targeted metabolomics approaches were used to obtain rat pulmonary metabolic profiles in this study. First, the metabolic alterations resulting from asphyxia were explored. There were significant changes found in carbohydrate metabolism, the endocrine system, and the sensory system. Second, we screened potential biomarkers and built clas-sification models to determine the cause of death. Moreover, some biomarkers remained differen-tiated at 24 h and 48 h postmortem, so the cause of death could still be determined after death. This study showed the application potential of metabolomics to investigate the metabolic changes occur-ring in the process of death, as well as to determine the cause of death on the basis of metabolic differences even after death.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).