LATE BLOOD LEVELS OF NEUROFILAMENT LIGHT CORRELATE WITH OUTCOME IN TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major public health problem worldwide. It is estimated that almost 70 million TBIs occur each year. Currently, the diagnostic process relies in clinical examination and brain imaging, which both have limitations in detecting TBI. In addition to imaging and clinical examination, blood levels of brain-enriched biomarkers have been extensively studied as possible diagnostic help. Neurofilament light (NF-L) is one of the widely studied and is shown to have better prognostic value for functional outcome after TBI compared to other biomarkers. The aim of this study was to examine whether late serum NF-L levels associate with outcome in TBIs of different initial severity. In this retrospective study we measured serum NF-L levels on 178 patients with TBI 6 to 8 months after the injury, and from 40 controls after a similar interval from orthopaedic injury. Patients with a TBI were divided into two groups according to the severity of injury assessed with the Glasgow Coma Scale. The patient recovery and outcome were assessed with the extended Glasgow outcome scale. The main finding in this study was the association between the levels of NF-L and outcome in patients with moderate to severe TBI. In multivariate logistic regression, our model associated with outcome significantly with both patient groups but only in patients with more severe TBI the effect of NF-L level was significant. These results shows that elevated NF-L levels indicate more severe TBI and may be indicative of a worse outcome