Gout is a highly heterogeneous disease which occurs only in human being,it would cause gouty arthritis,and even lead to disability.There could be obvious alterations of metabolites in the serum of the patient with gout,and the discovery of metabolic characteristics may be helpful for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of gout.A gas chromatography-mass spectrometry(GC-MS) based metabolic profiling method was employed to analyze the distinctive metabolic patterns of serum in gout patients.Serum samples collected from 29 gout patients and 26 healthy controls were analyzed.The principal component analysis(PCA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis(PLS-DA) were used to assess the metabolic data.Marked differences between gout patients and healthy controls were shown in PCA score plot.Variable importance for project values(VIP) and Student’s t-test were combined to pick out the significant metabolic changes.Compared with that of the control group,the serum metabolic characteristics of the gout group were featured by increased levels of metabolites related to nucleotide metabolism(hypoxanthine, uric acid and uridine),carbohydrate metabolism(2,3-dihydroxybutyrate, D-threitol, D-gluconic acid,myo-inositol,etc.) and amino acid metabolism(3-hydroxy- 3-methylbutyrate,L-ornithine and indole-3-lactic acid),decreased levels of lipids(monoethanolamine,glycerol,glyceric acid,etc.),glycine and hypotaurine.The preliminary results suggest that GC-MS based metabolic profiling method appears to be a useful tool in the exploration of the serum metabolic characteristics of gout.These revealed disease-associated metabolic perturbations involved in multiple metabolic pathways including purine metabolism and the urea cycle,which could help to elucidate the pathogenesis of gout and provide a potential aid for the accurate diagnosis or treatment of gout.