A biomarker for severity of Alzheimer’s disease: ¹H-NMR resonances in cerebrospinal fluid correlate with performance in mini-mental-state-exam

Abstract

Context: There is no valid biomarker for severity of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) available until now.

Objective: Therefore, we investigated ¹H-NMR spectroscopy for specific resonances as biomarkers for severity of AD.

Materials and methods: Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients with diagnosed AD and healthy control subjects was analysed by one-dimensional water-suppressed ¹H-NMR spectroscopy. The resonances were correlated with the cognitive performance of the patients and controls.

Results: Specific ¹H-NMR resonances showed higher intensities in AD patients than in control subjects. Mini-mental-state-exam scores correlated with ¹H-NMR resonances in AD patients.

Discussion and conclusion: ¹H-NMR resonances of CSF are obviously valid biomarker for severity of AD, despite the lack of knowledge of the underlying molecular structure. Successful isolation and identification of these substances will most likely provide details to the pathophysiology of AD.

Keywords::

• Diagnostic marker
• dementia
• metabonomics
• proteomics

Acknowledgments

The authors kindly thank the Network of Competence in Dementia of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Berlin, Germany) for providing some of the liquor samples analysed in this study and Brigitte Schlegel from the Leibnitz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (Berlin, Germany) for her help with obtaining the ¹H-NMR spectra.

Declaration of interest

Funding was provided by the German Federal Ministry of Economics (Bundeswirtschaftsministerium, KF2027802AJ9) and the Sonnenfeld-Foundation (Sonnenfeld-Stiftung).