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. 2022 Apr;27(4):1956-1962.
doi: 10.1038/s41380-022-01446-5. Epub 2022 Jan 25.

Peripheral immunity is associated with the risk of incident dementia

Ya-Ru Zhang  1   2 , Ji-Jing Wang  3 , Shu-Fen Chen  1   2 , Hui-Fu Wang  1   2   4   5 , Yu-Zhu Li  4 , Ya-Nan Ou  5 , Shu-Yi Huang  1   2 , Shi-Dong Chen  1   2 , Wei Cheng  4 , Jian-Feng Feng  4 , Qiang Dong  1   2 , Jin-Tai Yu  6   7
Affiliations

Peripheral immunity is associated with the risk of incident dementia

Ya-Ru Zhang et al. Mol Psychiatry. 2022 Apr.

Abstract

Central immunity components especially microglia in dementia have been well studied and corresponding immunotherapy gradually caught the attention. However, few studies focused on peripheral immunity and dementia. To address the issue, we examined the longitudinal association between incident dementia and peripheral immunity markers encompassing immune cell counts, and their derived ratios including neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), and lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR), utilizing data of 361,653 participants from the UK Biobank (UKB). During a median follow-up of 8.99 years, 4239 participants developed dementia. The results revealed that increased innate immunity markers were associated with higher dementia risk (per SD increment hazard ratio [HR]; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.14; 1.09-1.19 for neutrophils, 1.16; 1.11-1.20 for NLR and 1.11; 1.07-1.16 for SII), while increased adaptive immunity markers were associated with lower dementia risk (0.93; 0.90-0.97 for lymphocytes and 0.94; 0.90-0.98 for LMR). Our study pinpoints the differential role of innate and adaptive immunity in dementia incidence, which may provide some new perspectives in etiology and therapy of dementia.

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