College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai 201620, China.
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Diabetes Mellitus and Center for Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated Sixth People's Hospital, Shanghai 200233, China.
J Proteome Res. 2020 Apr 3;19(4):1383-1391. doi: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.9b00502. Epub 2020 Mar 9.
Free fatty acids (FFAs), also named nonesterified fatty acids, largely originate from the lipolysis of triacylglycerol stored in adipose tissue. Despite extensive research on sex- and age-dependent effects on lipolysis and lipid mobilization of adipose tissue, the primary differences in the metabolic characteristics of circulating FFAs among normal-weight healthy men and women during aging are still unclear. Here, we measured the concentrations of 45 FFAs in fasting sera of two Chinese community-based studies consisting of 201 metabolically healthy normal-weight adults to ascertain the associations of sex and age with FFA compositions and their upstream and downstream relations. Results showed greater conversions toward n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids of docosahexaenoic acid and n-6 of docosapentaenoic acid from their precursors in women than in men. Meanwhile, there were significantly positive correlations between the concentrations of a panel of saturated fatty acids with straight chain or branched chain and age in women, whereas no association was found in men. These findings highlight that sex and age should be considered as the potential confounding factors in assessing the risk for metabolic disturbance using FFA biomarkers.
游离脂肪酸（FFAs），也称为非酯化脂肪酸，主要来源于脂肪组织中储存的三酰甘油的水解。尽管对性别和年龄依赖性对脂肪组织的脂肪分解和脂质动员的影响进行了广泛的研究，但在衰老过程中，正常体重健康男性和女性之间循环 FFAs 的代谢特征的主要差异仍不清楚。在这里，我们测量了来自两个中国社区研究的 201 名代谢健康正常体重成年人空腹血清中的 45 种 FFAs 浓度，以确定性别和年龄与 FFA 组成及其上下游关系的关联。结果表明，与男性相比，女性中二十二碳六烯酸和二十二碳五烯酸的 n-3 多不饱和脂肪酸及其前体向 n-3 多不饱和脂肪酸的转化率更高。同时，在女性中，一组具有直链或支链的饱和脂肪酸的浓度与年龄呈显著正相关，而在男性中则没有相关性。这些发现强调，在使用 FFA 生物标志物评估代谢紊乱风险时，性别和年龄应被视为潜在的混杂因素。
