Abstract
Patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) were grouped into subtypes by a symptom-based diagnostic system of the traditional Chinese medicine for detecting metabolomic information that would otherwise be lost due to the high degree of variations in clinical samples. LC/MS-based metabolomic tools were employed to identify distinct metabolomic features in T2DM patients in one of the subtypes in the symptom-based diagnostic system. Several of the affected metabolic pathways could be ameliorated by the combined treatment of metformin and DPP4 inhibitor, except the taurine/hypotaurine metabolic pathway. It was possible that modulating the taurine/hypotaurine metabolism in the combined treatment with metformin and DPP4 inhibitor would enhance the therapeutic effects. To this end, a mouse diabetic model was treated with taurine in addition to metformin and DPP4 inhibitor. Indeed supplementing taurine during the combined treatment led to improvements in various indicators of the disorder such as those for the fatty acid and glucose metabolisms. It could be concluded that taurine was a useful supplement for treating T2DM with metformin and DPP4 inhibitor.