Aging
Navigate
Submit an Article
Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 10|pp 9855—9867

Red blood cell distribution width is associated with neuronal damage in acute ischemic stroke

Rong-Hua Hong1, Jian Zhu1, Ze-Zhi Li2, Jian Yuan1, Pei Zhao1, Jie Ding2, Qing-Lei Fan1, Jin Yang1, Bao-Guo Liu1, Jian Cai1,2, De-Sheng Zhu1,2, Yang-tai Guan2
  • 1Department of Neurology, Baoshan Branch, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200444, China
  • 2Department of Neurology, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200127, China
* Co-first authors
Received: February 13, 2020Accepted: April 20, 2020Published: May 23, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103250

Copyright © 2020 Hong 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

Elevated red blood cell distribution width (RDW) has been found to be associated with the occurrence of ischemic stroke. However, there is no defined relationship between RDW and neuronal damage in acute ischemic stroke (AIS). This study was designed to determine the relationship between RDW and neuronal damage in AIS patients. A total of 442 consecutive AIS patients from January 2018 to June 2019 were evaluated for neuronal damage, which was estimated by serum neuron-specific enolase (NSE) levels. Red blood cell distribution width-standard deviation (RDW-SD), a parameter that reflects the heterogeneity of red blood cell volume, was also assessed. We evaluated the association between the RDW-SD and serum NSE level through multivariate-adjusted linear regression analysis. Both the serum NSE level and the incidence of high NSE increased according to the increased RDW-SD tertile in AIS patients (p<0.01). There was a positive correlation between RDW-SD and serum NSE levels (r=0.275, 95% CI: 0.187-0.359, p<0.001). The beta coefficients (95% CI) between RDW-SD and serum NSE levels were 0.32 (0.21-0.42, p<0.001) and 0.26 (0.15-0.38, p<0.001), respectively, in AIS patients before and after adjusting for potential confounders. In conclusion, we found a significant positive association between RDW-SD and neuronal damage in AIS patients.