Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 8|pp 2420—2429

Diagnostic performance of new and classic CSF biomarkers in age-related dementias

Francesca Marchegiani¹, Giulia Matacchione², Deborah Ramini², Fiorella Marcheselli¹, Rina Recchioni¹, Tiziana Casoli³, Elisa Mercuri², Marco Lazzarini², Belinda Giorgetti³, Valentina Cameriere⁴, Susy Paolini⁴, Lucia Paciaroni⁴, Tommaso Rossi⁴, Roberta Galeazzi⁵, Rosamaria Lisa⁶, Anna Rita Bonfigli⁶, Antonio Domenico Procopio^1,², Maria De Luca⁷, Giuseppe Pelliccioni⁴, Fabiola Olivieri^1,²

¹Center of Clinical Pathology and Innovative Therapy, IRCCS INRCA, Ancona, Italy
²Department of Clinical and Molecular Sciences, DISCLIMO, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy
³Center for Neurobiology of Aging, IRCCS INRCA, Ancona, Italy
⁴Neurology Unit, IRCCS INRCA, Ancona, Italy
⁵Clinical Laboratory and Molecular Diagnostics, IRCCS INRCA, Ancona, Italy
⁶Scientific Direction, IRCCS INRCA, Ancona, Italy
⁷Department of Nutrition Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA

* * Equal contribution

Received: March 18, 2019Accepted: April 14, 2019Published: April 27, 2019

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101925

Copyright: Marchegiani 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

The identification of diagnostic-prognostic biomarkers of dementia has become a global priority due to the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases in aging populations. The objective of this study was to assess the diagnostic performance of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers across patients affected by either Alzheimer’s disease (AD), tauopathies other than AD (TP), or vascular dementia (VD), and cognitively normal subjects (CNS). One hundred fifty-three patients were recruited and tested for classical AD CSF biomarkers- Amyloid-ß42 and tau proteins - and novel candidate biomarkers - neurofilament (NF-) light and microRNA (miR) -21, -125b, -146a, and -222.

All dementia patients had significantly higher concentrations of NF-light compared to CNS, with the TP group displaying the highest NF-light values. A significant inverse correlation was also observed between NF-light and cognitive impairment. Of the four miRNAs analyzed, miR-222 levels were significantly increased in VD patients compared to both CNS and AD. In addition, while NF-light showed a better diagnostic performance than miR-222 and classical AD biomarkers in differentiating TP and VD from CNS, classical AD biomarkers revealed higher performance in discriminating AD from non-AD disorders.

Overall, our results suggest that CSF NF-light and miR-222 are promising biomarkers that may help to diagnose non-AD disorders.