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Updated: Nov 2, 2025
Author Spotlight: Unveiling the Pathway Linking Obesity to Autoimmune Inflammation in Multiple Sclerosis
Published on: February 23, 2024
Serum neurofilament levels reflect outer retinal layer changes in multiple sclerosis
Caspar B Seitz1, Falk Steffen1, Muthuraman Muthuraman1
1Department of Neurology, Focus Program Translational Neuroscience (FTN), Rhine Main Neuroscience Network (rmn), University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany.
Background:
Serum neurofilament light chain (sNfL) and distinct intra-retinal layers are both promising biomarkers of neuro-axonal injury in multiple sclerosis (MS). We aimed to unravel the association of both markers in early MS, having identified that neurofilament has a distinct immunohistochemical expression pattern among intra-retinal layers.
Methods:
Three-dimensional (3D) spectral domain macular optical coherence tomography scans and sNfL levels were investigated in 156 early MS patients (female/male: 109/47, mean age: 33.3 ± 9.5 years, mean disease duration: 2.0 ± 3.3 years). Out of the whole cohort, 110 patients had no history of optic neuritis (NHON) and 46 patients had a previous history of optic neuritis (HON). In addition, a subgroup of patients (n = 38) was studied longitudinally over 2 years. Support vector machine analysis was applied to test a regression model for significant changes.
Results:
In our cohort, HON patients had a thinner outer plexiform layer (OPL) volume compared to NHON patients (B = -0.016, SE = 0.006, p = 0.013). Higher sNfL levels were significantly associated with thinner OPL volumes in HON patients (B = -6.734, SE = 2.514, p = 0.011). This finding was corroborated in the longitudinal subanalysis by the association of higher sNfL levels with OPL atrophy (B = 5.974, SE = 2.420, p = 0.019). sNfL levels were 75.7% accurate at predicting OPL volume in the supervised machine learning.
Conclusions:
In summary, sNfL levels were a good predictor of future outer retinal thinning in MS. Changes within the neurofilament-rich OPL could be considered as an additional retinal marker linked to MS neurodegeneration.
