A prospective metabolome-wide association study revealed widespread amino acid limitation in late pregnancy is associated with early onset breast cancer. Archival third trimester pregnancy serum samples from 172 women who subsequently were diagnosed with breast cancer within 38 years after pregnancy were compared to 351 women without breast cancer. No individual metabolite differed after false discovery rate adjustment, indicating that individual metabolites are unlikely to be useful for classification or prediction. Despite this, pathway enrichment analysis showed that amino acid pathways, including lysine, arginine, proline, aspartate, asparagine, alanine, tyrosine, tryptophan, histidine, branched-chain amino acid and urea cycle, were enriched among metabolites that differed at raw p < 0.05. Several of these pathways previously were linked to breast carcinogen exposures, including dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and perfluorinated alkyl substances. Network analyses showed that amino acids correlated with parity and the ratio of estriol to estrone and estradiol known risk factors for breast cancer in this cohort. Overall, amino acid associations were stronger for early onset breast cancer, defined here as occurring within the first 15 years following pregnancy. Although results must be interpreted cautiously, lower amino acid concentrations for histidine, threonine and proline, and stronger associations for tryptophan, histidine, and lysine pathways with breast cancer within 15 years, suggests that amino acid limitations during late pregnancy contribute to metabolic reprogramming that is causally related to early onset breast cancer. Environmental chemical effects on nutrient sensing could account for these effects through known oncogenic mechanisms linked to nutrient stress.
Keywords: Amino acids; Early onset breast cancer; Metabolomics; Pregnancy.