LC/MS MetaboAnalyst Pathway Analysis data interpretation

I am using MetaboAnalyst to compare two LC-MS treatment groups. After an unpaired t-test I uploaded the significant metabolites and obtained several pathways with low p-values, indicating they are perturbed between the groups.

Could you please advise on the best way to decide whether a significant pathway is overall up-regulated or down-regulated? Specifically:

  1. Does the Pathway Analysis output include a built-in aggregate metric that already captures pathway directionality?

  2. If not, is the recommended approach to interpret per-metabolite fold-changes and calculate an aggregate statistic externally?

  3. Is there a workflow you suggest when describing pathway directionality in a manuscript?