Objective:

To identify lipid markers in diabetic distal symmetrical polyneuropathy (DDSP) with conduction slowing (CS).

Background:

Metabolic dysfunction may precede DDSP for several years when the disease is asymptomatic yet the person is experiencing subclinical and irreversible axonal loss. However, no study has investigated the role of lipidomic markers in nerve conduction slowing in DDSP.

Design/Methods:

We collected the serum from 3 health controls (HC) samples and 3 patients with DDSP with CS (DNCS). The samples were processed and the lipidomic analysis was performed by the Mass Spectrometers (MS). The relative lipid abundance was calculated based on ionized counting. To enhance the identity, we used both ESI MS negative and positive ion modes to profile lipids in serum of diabetic patients.

Results:

Total 164 lipids including PCs, PEs, and TGs, were profiled in patients’ sera. Two significantly changed lipids were identified as PC H(38:4), which was lowered to half level of that in HC group, and PE(38:6|16:0_22:6), which was increased by 1.5 times of that in HC group. Although most of the identified lipids were not shown to be significantly changed in DNCS when compared to that in health control, the changes with both increasing and decreasing tendency in the ratio of normalized ion count (DNCS/HC) were observed. Thus, more lipids are likely to manifest significant alterations in DNCS compared with HC if the sample sizes are increased to mitigate the variation of small size of samples.

Conclusions:

Our preliminary results demonstrated that lipidomic analysis is a useful way to screen lipid biomarkers involved in impairment of nerve conduction in DDSP. Work in progress to enroll more patients including DDSP without CS, diabetic without neuropathy and CIDP patients to investigate if there are specific significant lipid biomarkers in the development of CS. The correlation between levels of lipidomic parameters and nerve conduction velocity is anticipated.