An Association Between Saturated Fatty Acid-Containing Phosphatidylcholine in Cerebrospinal Fluid with Tau Phosphorylation.

Background: Mechanistic studies in animal models implicate a role for saturated fatty acids in neurodegeneration, but validation of this finding in human studies is still lacking.

Objective: We investigated how cerebrospinal levels of sphingomyelins (SM) and phosphatidylcholine (PC)-containing saturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids associate with total tau and phosphorylated tau (p-tau).

Methods: Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) lipids were measured in two cohorts, a discovery and a confirmation cohort of older non-demented individuals from the University of Southern California and Huntington Medical Research Institutes cohorts.