Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 6|pp 7931—7942

Circulating perilipin 2 levels are associated with fat mass, inflammatory and metabolic markers and are higher in women than men

Maria Conte^1,², Aurelia Santoro¹, Salvatore Collura¹, Morena Martucci¹, Giuseppe Battista¹, Alberto Bazzocchi³, Cristina Morsiani¹, Federica Sevini¹, Miriam Capri^1,², Daniela Monti⁴, Claudio Franceschi⁵, Stefano Salvioli^1,²

¹Department of Experimental, Diagnostic and Specialty Medicine (DIMES), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
²Interdepartmental Center “Alma Mater Research Institute on Global Challenges and Climate Change (Alma Climate)”, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
³Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli, Bologna, Italy
⁴Department of Experimental and Clinical Biomedical Sciences “Mario Serio”, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
⁵Laboratory of Systems Medicine of Healthy Aging and Department of Applied Mathematics, Lobachevsky University, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

Received: December 3, 2020Accepted: March 4, 2021Published: March 17, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202840

Copyright: © 2021 Conte 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

Perilipin 2 (PLIN2) is a protein involved in lipid storage and metabolism in non-adipose tissues. Detectable levels of circulating PLIN2 (cPLIN2) have been reported to be associated with some types of cancer, but no systematic analysis of age-related modifications in cPLIN2 levels has ever been performed. We measured serum cPLIN2 in a group of old people including centenarians in comparison with young subjects and tested possible correlations with parameters of body composition, fat and glucose metabolism, and inflammation. We found that: i. levels of cPLIN2 do not change with age, but women have higher levels of cPLIN2 with respect to men; ii. cPLIN2 levels strongly correlate to BMI, as well as fat and lean mass; iii. cPLIN2 levels strongly correlate with the proinflammatory adipokine leptin. Due to the adipogenic activity of leptin, it is hypothesized that cPLIN2 is affected and possibly regulated by this pleiotropic adipokine. Moreover, these results suggest that cPLIN2 (possibly together with leptin) could be assumed as a proxy for body adiposity.