An exploratory 1 H‐nuclear magnetic resonance metabolomics study reveals altered urine spectral profiles in infants with atopic dermatitis

Funding sources: we acknowledge financial support by the University of Verona and Bruker Biospin Srl (Joint Research Project 2007), and by Fondazione Cariverona (young investigator grant 2007). Conflicts of interest: none declared. Madam, Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a common chronic inflammatory skin disease in children. The prevalence of diagnosed AD in a population of preschool children has been observed to be above 15%,1 therefore representing a major health impact in paediatrics. The pathogenesis of AD is only partially known,2 and little information is available about potential biomarkers. These facts make an easy and noninvasive test for evaluation of infant AD greatly desired by healthcare workers and parents. Metabolomics provides a new approach and opportunity to explore the metabolic effects of many conditions in individuals,3, 4 and recent evidence has demonstrated that it can be usefully employed in the characterization of airway biochemical fingerprints in children with allergic asthma.5 Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra of biofluids contain signals from hundreds of metabolites. Chemometric approaches, such as principal component analysis (PCA) or cluster analyses, can be used to map the spectra in multivariate space where each sample occupies a position based on its metabolite composition.