Plasma visfatin (PBEF1/ NAMPT) level in alzheimer's disease

Introduction:Alzheimer?s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in elderly. It is characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive functions. In clinical practice, current criteria for diagnosis of AD are still largely based on the exclusion of secondary causes and other dementive disorders. In view of this, the need for spesific AD marker is great. Visfatin is a cytokine expressed from adipocyte. In this study, we searched serum level of Visfatin as possible diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for AD.Material and Method:In the present study, 40 AD patients and 40 healthy control subjects were included. AD patients were selected consecutively from Dementia outpatient clinic in Dokuz Eylül University, Department of Neurology between the dates of 20.06.2009-20.03.2010. Control cases were selected from the healthy elderly volunteer persons with similar demographic features. We characterized the expression of Visfatin protein in serum by ELISA in patients with AD and control cases. Beside levels of Visfatin we investigated serum fasting glucose levels (FGL) , LDL, HDL, triglyceride, total cholesterol ve CRP. All the patients and controls also were examined with the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), Benton Facial Recognition Test and Category Naming Test.Results:The concentration of Visfatin protein in sera from patients with AD was not different from controls. We did not find any correlation between serum Visfatin levels and clinical parameters of AD. Also we did not find any correlation between serum levels of visfatin and CRP.Discussion:Our study showed that level of Visfatin in the serum cannot be considered as a biomarker for AD for this time being. Future studies are necessary to clarify exact role of Visfatin in AD pathogenesis.