Evaluation of Cerebrospinal Fluid Neurofilament Light Chain as a Routine Biomarker in a Memory Clinic

Abstract

Systematic evaluation of biomarkers in representative populations is needed to validate their clinical utility. In this work, we assessed the diagnostic performance of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) neurofilament light chain (NfL) in a neurocognitive clinical setting. A total of 51 patients with different cognitive clinical syndromes and 11 cognitively normal individuals were evaluated in a memory clinic in Argentina. Clinical conditions included mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n = 12), dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT, n = 14), behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n = 13), and primary progressive aphasia (logopenic [n = 6], semantic [n = 2], and nonfluent [n = 4]). We quantified CSF NfL and core Alzheimer's disease biomarkers using commercially available ELISA kits. Cortical thickness was analyzed on brain magnetic resonance imaging scans from 10 controls and 10 patients. CSF NfL was significantly increased in MCI, FTD, and DAT patients compared with controls (Kruskal-Wallis, p < .0001). Interestingly, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed the highest area under the curve (AUC) value when analyzing control versus bvFTD patients (AUC = 0.9441). Also, we observed a marginally significant correlation between NfL levels and left orbitofrontal cortex thickness in a small group of patients with FTD. Overall, our results further support CSF NfL as a promising biomarker in the diagnostic workup of bvFTD.

Keywords: Biology of aging; Dementia; Latin America; Neurodegeneration.