In the era of precision medicine, the analysis of simple information like sex and age can increase the potential to better diagnose and treat conditions that occur more frequently in one of the two sexes, present sex-specific symptoms and outcomes, or are characteristic of a specific age group. We present here study of the association networks constructed from an array of 22 plasma metabolites measured on a cohort of 844 healthy blood donors. Through differential network analysis we show that specific association networks can be associated with sex and age: different connectivity patterns where observed suggesting sex-related variability in several metabolic pathways (branched-chain amino acids, ketone bodies and propanoate metabolism). Reduction in metabolite hubs connectivity was also found to be associated with age in both sex groups. Network analysis was complemented with standard univariate and multivariate statistical analysis that revealed age and sex specific metabolic signatures. Our results demonstrate that the characterization of metabolite–metabolite association networks is a promising and powerful a tool to investigate the human phenotype at a molecular level.

中文翻译：

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年龄和性别对健康受试者血浆代谢物关联网络的影响

在精密医学时代，对诸如性别和年龄之类的简单信息进行分析可以增加更好地诊断和治疗在两种性别之一中更频繁出现，表现出特定性别的症状和结局，或具有特征性的疾病的潜力。特定年龄段。我们目前在这里研究由844名健康献血者组成的队列中测量的22种血浆代谢物构成的关联网络。通过差异网络分析，我们发现特定的关联网络可以与性别和年龄相关联：观察到的不同连通性模式暗示了几种代谢途径（支链氨基酸，酮体和丙酸酯代谢）中与性别相关的变异性。在两个性别组中，也发现代谢物枢纽连接性的降低与年龄有关。网络分析与标准的单变量和多变量统计分析相辅相成，揭示了特定年龄和性别的代谢特征。我们的结果表明，代谢物-代谢物缔合网络的表征是在分子水平上研究人类表型的有前途和有力的工具。