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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 3|pp 2647—2658

Association of serum retinoic acid with depression in patients with acute ischemic stroke

Cai-Di Yang1, Ming-Li Cheng2, Wen Liu3, Ding-Hua Zeng1
  • 1Department of Neurology, Eastern Hospital, Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences and Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, Chengdu 610101, China
  • 2Department of Neurology, People's Hospital of Jianyang, Jianyang 641400, China
  • 3The Clinical Laboratory Department, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong 637000, China
Received: October 1, 2019Accepted: January 12, 2020Published: February 10, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102767

Copyright: © 2020 Yang 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

Retinoic acid (RA), produced by the metabolism of vitamin A, makes effects on depression and stroke. This study was aimed to evaluate the relationship between RA levels in serum and post-stroke depression (PSD). A single-center (Chengdu, China) prospective cohort study was conducted on patients with acute ischemic stroke. The RA serum level was measured at admission. The PSD was assessed in the 3-month follow-up. The RA-PSD relationship was evaluated with conditional logistic regression. In total, 239 ischemic stroke cases and 100 healthy controls were included. The median RA serum level in patients with ischemic stroke was 2.45 ng/ml (interquartile range [IQR], 0.72-4.33), lower(P<0.001) than 3.89 ng/ml of those in control cases ([IQR]: 2.62-5.39). The crude and adjusted odds ratios [OR] (and 95% confidence intervals [CI]) of PSD associated with an IQR increase for RA were 0.54 (0.44, 0.67) and 0.66 (0.52, 0.79), respectively. Higher ORs of PSD associated with reduced RA levels (<cut-off=2.8ng/ml) were observed (OR=3.01 [95% CI, 2.34-4.98]; P<0.001). This study revealed that, in patients with ischemic stroke, reduced RA serum level was related to higher risk of PSD at 3 months, which may be applied as a predictive indicator.