Plasma Acylcarnitines and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in a Mediterranean Population at High Cardiovascular Risk.

Abstract

The potential associations between acylcarnitine profiles and incidence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) and whether acylcarnitines can be used to improve diabetes prediction remain unclear. To evaluate the associations between baseline and 1-year changes in acylcarnitines and their diabetes predictive ability beyond traditional risk factors. We designed a case-cohort study within the PREDIMED Study including all incident cases of T2D (n = 251) and 694 randomly selected participants at baseline (follow-up, 3.8 years). Plasma acylcarnitines were measured using a targeted approach by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. We tested the associations between baseline and 1-year changes in individual acylcarnitines and T2D risk using weighted Cox regression models. We used elastic net regressions to select acylcarnitines for T2D prediction and compute a weighted score using a cross-validation approach. An acylcarnitine profile, especially including short- and long-chain acylcarnitines, was significantly associated with a higher risk of T2D independent of traditional risk factors. The relative risks of T2D per SD increment of the predictive model scores were 4.03 (95% CI, 3.00 to 5.42; P An acylcarnitine profile, mainly including short- and long-chain acylcarnitines, was significantly associated with higher T2D risk in participants at high cardiovascular risk. The inclusion of acylcarnitines into the model did not significantly improve the T2D prediction C-statistics beyond traditional risk factors, including fasting glucose.