Blood-brain barrier dysfunction and reduced cerebrospinal fluid levels of soluble amyloid precursor protein-β in patients with subcortical small-vessel disease.

Introduction: Subcortical small-vessel disease (SSVD) is the most common vascular cognitive disorder. However, because no disease-specific cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers are available for SSVD, our aim was to identify such markers.

Methods: We included 170 healthy controls and patients from the Gothenburg Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) study clinically diagnosed with SSVD dementia, Alzheimer's disease (AD), or mixed AD/SSVD. We quantified CSF levels of amyloid-β (Aβ), Aβ, Aβ, as well as soluble amyloid precursor protein (sAPP)-α and sAPP-β.

Results: sAPP-β was lower in SSVD patients than in AD patients and controls. Receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analyses showed that sAPP-β moderately separated SSVD from AD and controls. Moreover, the CSF/serum albumin ratio was elevated exclusively in SSVD and could moderately separate SSVD from the other groups in ROC analyses.

Discussion: SSVD has a biomarker profile that differs from that of AD and controls, and to some extent also from mixed AD/SSVD, suggesting that signs of blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction and sAPP-β could be additional tools to diagnose SSVD.

Highlights: Patients with subcortical small-vessel disease (SSVD) exhibited reduced levels of sAPP-β and disturbances of the blood-brain barrier (BBB).This biochemical pattern is different from that of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to some degree from that of mixed AD/SSVD.Our findings are speaking in favor of the concept that SSVD is a distinct vascular cognitive disorder (VCD) form.