Novel inflammatory markers associated with cognitive performance: Singapore Longitudinal Ageing Studies

We identified and validated several novel inflammatory markers of cognitive performance in community-living older persons. An exploratory study (n = 83) correlated 177 inflammatory markers assayed by Luminex with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and identified 8 inflammatory markers for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and correlations with MMSE, Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and cognitive impairment in the validation study (n = 139). The validation study replicated the significant associations of soluble interleukin-2 receptor alpha chain (sIL-2Rα; p = 0.050), soluble tumor necrosis factor receptor 2 (sTNFR2; p = 0.002) and soluble glycoprotein 130 (sgp130; p = 0.026) with MMSE, and sIL-2Rα (p = 0.019) and sgp130 (p < 0.001) with MoCA. Significant trends of associations of tertiles of sgp130, sIL-2Rα, and sTNFR2 were found with cognitive impairment. Highly elevated estimates of association of high versus low tertiles were obtained for sgp130 (odds ratio [OR] = 4.24, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.96-18.8), sIL-2Rα (OR = 3.94, 95% CI 0.83-18.7), and sTNFR2 (OR = 7.58, 95% CI 1.19-48.1). sgp130, sTNFR2, and sIL-2Rα are promising inflammatory markers of low cognitive performance for further investigation.