NMR Spectroscopy Metabolomics Applied to Crack Cocaine Users and Patients with Schizophrenia: Similar Behavior but Different Molecular Causes

Crack‐cocaine abuse and dependence is a severe public health problem. Sometimes, the crack‐cocaine smokers show behavioral changes and symptoms very similar to those observed for severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia. Although crack‐cocaine use can easily be detected in smokers by urine or blood tests, after some time, cocaine biomarkers become untraceable. In addition, schizophrenia diagnosis is limited to clinical interviews, while precise clinical tests for this mental disorder remain unknown. Employing metabolomics based on NMR spectroscopy, herein, we showed that blood serum metabolites might be used for discrimination between crack‐cocaine users and schizophrenia patients groups. These two groups showed the greatest differences in around eleven key‐metabolites. Moreover, seven possible peripheral metabolites might be enough for differentiation of crack‐cocaine users and healthy controls. These results may contribute to a better understanding of crack‐cocaine biochemical effects, and enable more precise diagnosis when crack‐cocaine biomarkers, methylecgonidine or ecgonidine, are absent from the urine or blood of crack‐cocaine users. Crack‐cocaine abuse causes significant metabolomic changes that provoke behavior alterations, which easily can be mistaken for positive symptoms of schizophrenia. 1D and 2D NMR analyses combined with chemometrics point to biomarkers that suffered alterations in the studied populations. Thus, NMR‐based metabolomics, differently of what we might assume by comparing symptoms, showed that molecular differences between these two morbidities are easy to detect.