The association between plasma fatty acid and cognitive function mediated by inflammation in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus

Abstract

In this study, we evaluated the cognitive function of 372 Chinese patients (214 males and 158 females; the average age was 57.09 ± 9.00 years) with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) by using the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) and the Montreal cognitive assessment (MoCA), with Plasma fatty acids measured by gas chromatography analysis and inflammatory cytokines determined by immune turbidimetric analysis and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to investigate whether there was a correlation between the plasma fatty acids, plasma inflammatory cytokine levels and cognitive test scores in Chinese patients with T2DM. We found the increasing of body mass index (BMI) might lead to cognitive impairment and induce inflammatory response. Higher saturated fatty acids (SFAs) levels in plasma were linked to cognitive decline, while higher monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) intake might be a protective factor for cognitive function. In addition, most polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) levels stood out as having increasing trends that were positively correlated to cognitive function scores. In our study, we found higher SFAs led to higher proinflammatory factor levels. Apart from that, MUFAs and stearoyl-CoA desaturase-18 (SCD-18) were positively related to hypersensitive C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) (P<0.05; P<0.05; P<0.05). Meanwhile, our result also indicated that the increasing of C18:0 might reduce MoCA language skill scores by regulating plasma IL-10 levels. Plasma fatty acids could improve or damage cognitive function by regulating IL-10, which suggested plasma fatty acids could be evaluated as a potential indicator of cognitive function decline in T2DM.