The Urinary Proteomic Profile Implicates Key Regulators for Urologic Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome (UCPPS), 2022, Froehlich et al

[Sly Saint]

How chronic pain shows up in urine - Researchers distinguish urinary pelvic pain from healthy controls — and from other chronic pain diseases

By Renae Crossing
May 10, 2022
Chronic pain diseases are underresearched — particularly for women, particularly with pelvic pain. Almost certainly, someone you know suffers from this. For people with urinary chronic pelvic pain syndrome, or UCPPS, the need to urinate is particularly frequent or urgent, or pelvic pain is prominent, or both. It’s often simply a diagnosis of exclusion, and there is a lack of effective treatments.
Using protein signatures in urine, researchers have been able to distinguish UCPPS from other chronic pain diseases, including myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, as well as fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome.

Froehlich said he would be “tickled” if other researchers mined the open data to help people with chronic pain diseases. The growing global burden of ME/CFS includes an estimated 46% of people with long COVID-19 who meet criteria for the disease.

full article and link to research paper
https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/051022/how-chronic-pain-shows-up-in-urine

 

[Andy]

Full title: The Urinary Proteomic Profile Implicates Key Regulators for Urologic Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome (UCPPS): A MAPP Research Network Study

Highlights

• The proteomics of urinary chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS) found altered pathways.
• Key changes among the extracellular matrix and inflammatory response proteins were found.
• Several of these pathways and proteins were exclusively altered in UCPPS.
• These findings may have diagnostic and/or therapeutic potential in the future.

Abstract
Urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS) is a condition of unknown etiology characterized by pelvic pain and urinary frequency and/or urgency. As the proximal fluid of this syndrome, urine is an ideal candidate sample matrix for an unbiased study of UCPPS. In this study, a large, discovery-phase, TMT-based quantitative urinary proteomics analysis of 244 participants was performed. The participants included patients with UCPPS (n = 82), healthy controls (HC) (n = 94), and disparate chronic pain diseases, termed positive controls (PC) (n = 68). Using training and testing cohorts, we identified and validated a small and distinct set of proteins that distinguished UCPPS from HC (n = 9) and UCPPS from PC (n = 3). The validated UCPPS: HC proteins were predominantly extracellular matrix/extracellular matrix modifying or immunomodulatory/host defense in nature. Significantly varying proteins in the UCPPS: HC comparison were overrepresented by the members of several dysregulated biological processes including decreased immune cell migration, decreased development of epithelial tissue, and increased bleeding. Comparison with the PC cohort enabled the evaluation of UCPPS-specific upstream regulators, contrasting UCPPS with other conditions that cause chronic pain. Specific to UCPPS were alterations in the predicted signaling of several upstream regulators, including alpha-catenin, interleukin-6, epidermal growth factor, and transforming growth factor beta 1, among others. These findings advance our knowledge of the etiology of UCPPS and inform potential future clinical translation into a diagnostic panel for UCPPS.

Open access, https://www.mcponline.org/article/S1535-9476(21)00148-1/fulltext

CFS patients were included in the positive control group, although we are not told how many.

 

[hibiscuswahine]

It is unfortunate they haven’t given the number of CFS patients in the supplementary material. The other pain groups were FM, IBS and headache.

I have co-morbid UCPSS (interstitial cystitis following recurrent UTI’s) so interested to see how relates to the pathophysiology of ME and I hope this spurs some further research with pwME’s urine.