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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 8|pp 2403—2419

Identification of inflammatory and vascular markers associated with mild cognitive impairment

Xue-Ning Shen1, Yanxia Lu2, Crystal Tze Ying Tan2, Ling-Yun Liu3,4, Jin-Tai Yu1, Lei Feng3, Anis Larbi2,5,6
  • 1Department of Neurology, Institute of Neurology, Huashan Hospital, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
  • 2Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore, Singapore
  • 3Department of Psychological Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
  • 4Department of Neurology, Yangpu Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China
  • 5Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
  • 6Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University Tunis El Manar, Tunis, Tunisia
Received: January 21, 2019Accepted: April 24, 2019Published: April 30, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101924

Copyright: Shen et al. This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Biochemical processes have been associated with the pathogenesis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia, including chronic inflammation, dysregulation of membrane lipids and disruption of neurotransmitter pathways. However, research investigating biomarkers of these processes in MCI remained sparse and inconsistent. To collect fresh evidence, we evaluated the performance of several potential markers in a cohort of 57 MCI patients and 57 cognitively healthy controls. MCI patients showed obviously increased levels of plasma TNF-α (p = 0.045) and C-peptide (p = 0.004) as well as decreased levels of VEGF-A (p = 0.042) and PAI-1 (p = 0.019), compared with controls. In addition, our study detected significant correlations of plasma sTNFR-1 (MCI + Control: B = -6.529, p = 0.020; MCI: B = -9.865, p = 0.011) and sIL-2Rα (MCI + Control: B = -7.010, p = 0.007; MCI: B = -11.834, p = 0.003) levels with MoCA scores in the whole cohort and the MCI group. These findings corroborate the inflammatory and vascular hypothesis for dementia. Future studies are warranted to determine their potential as early biomarkers for cognitive deficits and explore the related mechanisms.