A study by the Research Group on Cardiovascular Diseases at the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) has shown that biological sex determines some metabolic differences associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease. The work has been published in the journal https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-38881-4 Scientific Reports and highlights the role of metabolomics in the study of these diseases and their translation to the clinic.Cardiovascular diseases are the main responsible for mortality worldwide. The optimization of early care and personalized medical treatment would reduce the cardiovascular mortality rate, To achieve this, screening tools that can be applied at the population level are necessary.In addition, the heart is an organ that requires a lot of energy for its operation and, therefore, is metabolically very active. Researchers have seen small changes in metabolism appear before the diseases are manifestly open and, in the case of the heart, which is highly irrigated, it allows the changes in heart metabolism to be detected in the blood.For this reason, "in the laboratory we want to take advantage of artificial intelligence tools to analyze the metabolic profiles of blood obtained with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), which allow us to stratify cardiovascular risk individually," says Dr. Ignasi Barba, principal investigator of the Cardiovascular Disease Research Group of the VHIR and first author of the study. A major step forward before addressing this challenge is the study of how the confusion factors in cardiovascular diagnosis affect the metabolic pattern. "And one of these factors of confusion is sex as women, age by age, have a lower cardiovascular risk than men," says the researcher.So far it was known that sex affects the metabolic pattern of blood, specifically lipid types. In the study using full serum NMR spectra it has been shown that women have higher levels of lipoprotein than men. But it has also been seen that apart from lipids, there are other metabolites that are different. Specifically, from a population of high cardiovascular risk but without obvious disease "other metabolic differences associated with sex have been observed, mainly higher levels of glucose and lactic acid have been detected in women than in men," he explains the Dr. Barba"Knowledge of the variation in the metabolic profile associated with sex would facilitate metabolotic translation in the clinic," he adds.This article is the starting point of a much larger study, with 130 patients, about the metabolic pattern in the cardiovascular diagnosis that they have started in the Cardiovascular Disease group along with CIBER of Cardiovascular Diseases (CIBERCV) They expect results by the end of this year 2019.