Legends for figures 2 and 3 have been revised along with abbreviation for HCC; hepatocellular carcinoma. The online version of this article reflects these changes.

Despite recent advances in understanding the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and the mechanisms of antipsychotic drug action, the development of biomarkers for diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring in schizophrenia remains challenging. Metabolomics provides a powerful approach to discover diagnostic and therapeutic biomarkers by analyzing global changes in an individual's metabolic profile in response to pathophysiological stimuli or drug intervention. In this study, we performed gas chromatography-mass spectrometry based metabolomic profiling in serum of unmedicated schizophrenic patients before and after an 8-week risperidone monotherapy, to detect potential biomarkers associated with schizophrenia and risperidone treatment. Twenty-two marker metabolites contributing to the complete separation of schizophrenic patients from matched healthy controls were identified, with citrate, palmitic acid, myo-inositol, and allantoin exhibiting the best combined classification performance. Twenty marker metabolites contributing to the complete separation between posttreatment and pretreatment patients were identified, with myo-inositol, uric acid, and tryptophan showing the maximum combined classification performance. Metabolic pathways including energy metabolism, antioxidant defense systems, neurotransmitter metabolism, fatty acid biosynthesis, and phospholipid metabolism were found to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients and partially normalized following risperidone therapy. Further study of these metabolites may facilitate the development of noninvasive biomarkers and more efficient therapeutic strategies for schizophrenia.

Zheng, which is also called a syndrome or pattern, is the basic unit and a key concept of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theory. Zheng can be considered a further stratification of patients when it is integrated with biomedical diagnoses in clinical practice to achieve higher efficacies. In an era of evidence-based medicine, confronted with the vast and increasing volume of TCM data, there is an urgent need to explore these resources effectively using techniques of knowledge discovery in databases. The application of effective data mining in the analysis of multiple extensively integrated databases can supply new information about TCM Zheng research. In this paper, we screened the published literature on TCM Zheng-related studies in the SinoMed and PubMed databases with a novel data mining approach to obtain an overview of the Zheng research landscape in the hope of contributing to a better understanding of TCM Zheng in the era of evidence-based medicine. In our results, contrast was found in Zheng in different studies, and several determinants of Zheng were identified. The data described in this paper can be used to assess Zheng research studies based on the title and certain characteristics of the abstract. These findings will benefit modern TCM Zheng-related studies and guide future Zheng study efforts.

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common malignant bone tumor found in children. Currently, researchers have focused on protein and gene levels, while the associated metabolic variations have been poorly understood. In this study, we used a gas chromatography mass spectrometry approach and profiled small-molecule metabolites in serum and urine of 24 OS patients, 19 benign bone tumor patients, and 32 healthy controls, to determine whether there are significant alterations associated with carcinogenesis. The metabonomic results demonstrate clear intergroup separations between healthy control subjects and bone tumor patients in the orthogonal partial least-squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) models. Differential metabolites identified from the metabonomic analysis suggest a disrupted energy metabolism in OS patients, as characterized by significantly down-regulated TCA cycle and glycolysis, down-regulated lipid metabolism, dysregulated sugar levels, and up-regulated amino acid metabolism. Additionally, an increased activity of glutathione metabolism, and increased polyamine metabolism also contributed to a characteristic metabolic signature of OS patients.