Figure 4

Baseline GlycA level associated with future entorhinal cortex volume declines in LMCI patients. Baseline GlycA level was associated with entorhinal cortex volume declines in late mild cognitive impairment (LMCI) patients at the 2nd, 4th, and 6–8th years of follow-up. Spearman’s rank order correlation was performed on residuals of entorhinal cortex volume and GlycA, and the analyses were stratified by diagnosis status. Entorhinal cortex volume at different years was adjusted for baseline entorhinal cortex volume, screening age, follow-up year, BMI at the time, APOE4, sex, and education, treating participant ID as random factors (all MRI volumes were log2-transformed and adjusted for intracranial volume and magnet type); baseline GlycA level was log2-transformed and adjusted for medication, screening age, baseline BMI, APOE4, sex, and education. All significant results shown in the figure passed FDR correction using the Benjamini and Hochberg method (q = 0.2)⁵⁶. The analysis was performed on participants with different diagnosis statuses (Table S6), but only in the participants with LMCI was entorhinal cortex volume in three continuous follow-up years negatively associated with baseline GlycA level. Therefore, the analysis results for the participants with LMCI are shown here. In addition, the LMCI-GlycA interaction was confirmed with a linear mixed model (p = 0.005, Table S4). A similar full factorial linear mixed model was used to show that there were no sex-GlycA interactions controlling DX (p = 0.564). BMI: Body mass index; DX: Diagnosis at baseline; GlycA: Glycoprotein acetyls; ID: Identification; MRI: Magnetic resonance imaging.