Decoding the metabolic landscape of Parkinson’s disease: dansylated urinary amines and phenols submetabolomes for signature profiling and biomarker discovery

Parkinson’s disease (PD) lacks reliable non-invasive early diagnostic biomarkers with strong discriminative capacity, representing a major unmet clinical demand. We developed a dansylation workflow coupled to trapped ion mobility spectrometry–quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TIMS-Q-TOF-MS) for targeted profiling of the urinary amine–phenol submetabolome. Urine samples from 21 patients with PD, 21 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and 21 healthy controls (HCs) were analyzed, yielding annotations for 196 metabolites: 143 amine-containing species, 49 phenolic metabolites, and 4 dual-function metabolites carrying both amine and phenolic moieties.

Partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) confirmed the stability of our analytical pipeline. Screening with thresholds VIP > 1.2 and p