Analysis of urinary potassium isotopes and association with pancreatic health: healthy, diabetic and cancerous states.

Background: More than 700 million people worldwide suffer from diseases of the pancreas, such as diabetes, pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. Often dysregulation of potassium (K ⁺ ) channels, co-transporters and pumps can promote development and progression of many types of these diseases. The role of K ⁺ transport system in pancreatic cell homeostasis and disease development remains largely unexplored. Potassium isotope analysis (δ ⁴¹ K), however, might have the potential to detect minute changes in metabolic processes relevant for pancreatic diseases.
Methods: We assessed urinary K isotope composition in a case-control study by measuring K concentrations and δ ⁴¹ K in spot urines collected from patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (n=18), other pancreas-related diseases (n=14) and compared those data to healthy controls (n=16).
Results: Our results show that urinary K ⁺ levels for patients with diseased pancreas (benign and pancreatic cancer) are significantly lower than the healthy controls. For δ ⁴¹ K, the values tend to be higher for individuals with pancreatic cancer (mean δ ⁴¹ K = -0.58 ± 0.33‰) than for healthy individuals (mean δ ⁴¹ K = -0.78 ± 0.19‰) but the difference is not significant (p=0.08). For diabetics, urinary K ⁺ levels are significantly lower (p=0.03) and δ ⁴¹ K is significantly higher (p=0.009) than for the healthy controls. These results suggest that urinary K ⁺ levels and K isotopes can help identify K disturbances related to diabetes, an associated factors of all-cause mortality for diabetics.
Conclusion: Although the K isotope results should be considered exploratory and hypothesis-generating and future studies should focus on larger sample size and δ ⁴¹ K analysis of other K-disrupting diseases (e.g., chronic kidney disease), our data hold great promise for K isotopes as disease marker.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2024 Schilling, Chen, Glabonjat, Debernardi, Blyuss, Navas-Acien, Halliday and Crnogorac-Jurcevic.)