Micronutrients, Frailty, and Cognitive Impairment: Design and Preliminary Results from the CogLife 2.0 Study

Abstract

Background: Among preventive strategies against dementia, nutrition is considered a powerful one and the recently established "nutritional cognitive neuroscience of aging" is a highly active research field.

Objective: The present study was designed to deeply characterize older adults across the continuum from cognitive integrity to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and better elucidate the prognostic role of lipophilic micronutrients within their lipidomic signature.

Methods: 123 participants older than 65 years across the continuum from cognitive integrity to MCI were included [49 with subjective cognitive impairment, 29 women, 72.5±5.4 years, 26 MCI, 9 women, 74.5±5.8 years and 50 without cognitive impairment, 21 women, 70.8±4.3 years]. All participants underwent neuropsychological and nutritional examination as well as comprehensive geriatric assessment with calculation of the Multidimensional Prognostic Index (MPI) as a proxy of frailty and biological age and blood withdrawal for the analyses of lipophilic micronutrients, metabolomics and oxylipidomics. One year after the evaluation, same tests are ongoing.

Results: After adjustment for age, sex, daily fruit and vegetable intake and cholesterol, we found a significant positive correlation between lutein and the number of correct words in category fluency (p = 0.016).

Conclusions: This result supports the importance of carotenoids as robust biomarkers of cognitive performance independent of the nutritional status and frailty of the participants, as the entire present study collective was robust (MPI 0-0.33). The complete analyses of the metabolome and the oxylipidome will hopefully shed light on the metabolic and prognostic signature of cognitive decline in the rapidly growing population at risk of frailty.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; frailty; micronutrients; mild cognitive impairment; subjective cognitive impairment.