Abstract: Objective To explore metabolic phenotypic characteristics of psoriasis patients of blood-heat syndrome and mechanism of Liang Xue Jie Du Decoction before and after treatment with Liang Xue Jie Du Decoction using principal component analysis. Methods Totally 53 cases of blood-heat syndrome with psoriasis and 31 healthy volunteers were enrolled in this study, and their plasma metabolites were analyzed using nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR) spectrometer before and after treatment with Liang Xue Jie Du Decoction using principal component analysis. Results The partial least squares-discriminant analysis(PLS-DA) analysis of plasma ¹H NMR spectra revealed that not only the psoriasis patients of blood-heat syndrome is separated from the healthy volunteers, but also different metabolic spectra before and after treatment, demonstrated that the metabolic characteristics of the two groups were significantly different. The data of psoriasis patients after treatment clustered close to the healthy volunteers, suggesting that during Liang Xue Jie Du Decoction treatment the metabolic profile recovered towards normal. Conclusion The results obtained suggest that metabolomics studies could better reflect the whole status of metabolism in bio-systems, and could be applied as a potential powerful approach in pharmacological studies.

Key words: metabolomics, pattern recognition, nuclear magnetic resonance, psoriasis