Cerebral white matter integrity in Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus and integrated role of Interleukin-6: Findings in multiethnic middle-aged and older US-adults

In multiethnic US adults aged 50+ with Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus, multiple cerebral white matter tracts show impaired diffusion integrity, with the largest effect in the body of the corpus callosum (adj. Cohen’s d=0.28[0.17-0.38]).

• Why it matters: Prior work linked inflammation to the T2DM–brain relationship, but it remained unclear whether Interleukin-6 specifically mediates T2DM-associated cerebral white matter integrity.
• What they did: Diffusion-weighted MRI was analyzed in major white matter tracts in a subset of HABS-HD, with confounder-adjusted Cohen’s d and mediation tested using 1000-fold non-parametric bootstrapping and FDR correction.
• The result: IL-6 statistically mediated up to 15% of major T2DM–white matter associations, including in cognitively unimpaired participants, and effect sizes showed an increasing trend within two years.

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