Image_1_Analysis of urinary potassium isotopes and association with pancreatic health: healthy, diabetic and cancerous states.png

Background

More than 700 million people worldwide suffer from diseases of the pancreas, such as diabetes, pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. Often dysregulation of potassium (K⁺) channels, co-transporters and pumps can promote development and progression of many types of these diseases. The role of K⁺ transport system in pancreatic cell homeostasis and disease development remains largely unexplored. Potassium isotope analysis (δ⁴¹K), however, might have the potential to detect minute changes in metabolic processes relevant for pancreatic diseases.

Methods

We assessed urinary K isotope composition in a case-control study by measuring K concentrations and δ⁴¹K in spot urines collected from patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (n=18), other pancreas-related diseases (n=14) and compared those data to healthy controls (n=16).

Results

Our results show that urinary K⁺ levels for patients with diseased pancreas (benign and pancreatic cancer) are significantly lower than the healthy controls. For δ⁴¹K, the values tend to be higher for individuals with pancreatic cancer (mean δ⁴¹K = -0.58 ± 0.33‰) than for healthy individuals (mean δ⁴¹K = -0.78 ± 0.19‰) but the difference is not significant (p=0.08). For diabetics, urinary K⁺ levels are significantly lower (p=0.03) and δ⁴¹K is significantly higher (p=0.009) than for the healthy controls. These results suggest that urinary K⁺ levels and K isotopes can help identify K disturbances related to diabetes, an associated factors of all-cause mortality for diabetics.

Conclusion

Although the K isotope results should be considered exploratory and hypothesis-generating and future studies should focus on larger sample size and δ⁴¹K analysis of other K-disrupting diseases (e.g., chronic kidney disease), our data hold great promise for K isotopes as disease marker.