White matter hyperintensities (WMH) is mainly caused by cerebrovascular injury and may also increase the possibilities of progression to Alzheimer’s disease. The present study aims to determine whether plasma neurofilament light (NFL) protein levels could predict the progression of WMH volume in elderly persons without dementia. The present study enrolled 1029 non-dementia participants from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative in which all had measurements of plasma NFL and WMH at baseline and 589 had longitudinal measurements during follow-up. Spearman correlation analyses and regression models were used to assess cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between plasma NFL and WMH. Plasma NFL concentration had a moderately strong correlation with WMH at baseline (r = 0.17, p < 0.001). Longitudinal analyses showed that higher baseline plasma NFL concentration was associated with accelerated progression of WMH (β=0.015, p = 0.007). Furthermore, higher change rates of plasma NFL could predict faster progression of WMH in the future (β=0.581, p = 0.002). The results of the study suggest that plasma NFL level might be used as a noninvasive biomarker to track variation trend in WMH in elderly persons without dementia.
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