Type 2 Diabetes (DBT2) is a metabolic syndrome characterized by an increase in glucose and insulin blood levels. This syndrome is closely related to neurodegeneration and central nervous system damage.
Impaired Fasting Glucose (IFG) is the first step in DBT2 development, with fasting glucose levels between normal and DBT levels. Our previous results showed that patients with IFG exhibited significantly less score in a battery of cognitive tests called the “SAGE test” that evaluate different cognitive skills such as time-space orientation, short term memory, attention, construction of simple forms and associative memories. As cognitive decline in IFG has not been described yet, we investigated the relation between the overall SAGE test scores and different parameters. No correlation was found between the overall SAGE score and the age of the participants, or between the score and total cholesterol levels.
As inflammation is a risk factor for different degenerative diseases, we evaluated the plasmatic levels of IL-1β and TNFα. No significant difference was found between control and IFG patients. Additionally, there was no correlation between SAGE score and either of these proinflammatory cytokines. However, when we analyzed the dataset using multiple linear regressions, we found a significant association between SAGE scores, glucose and IL-1β levels which would suggest that inflammation would be one of the factors involved in cognitive impairment associated to IFG syndrome.