The Correlation of Serum Adiponectin Level with Evidence of Coronary Artery Disease in SPECT Myocardial Perfusion Imaging

Adiponectin is one of the specific hormones of adipose tissue that plays an important role in insulin sensitivity, and low levels of adiponectin are associated with atherosclerosis and coronary artery diseases. Considering the controversial role of adiponectin in coronary artery diseases, the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between adiponectin and evidence of coronary artery diseases in conventional single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI).

This prospective cross-sectional study was conducted on patients who were sus-pected of coronary artery disease who referred to a nuclear medicine department in a 6-month period for MPI. The correlation of serum adiponectin level was compared with these parameters as well as with fac-tors such as age, gender and coronary artery disease risk factors.

In this study, 172 patients with suspected coronary disease referring for nuclear cardiac scan were included. The mean age of the patients was 57.83±10.64 years with a range of 28-87 years. The re-sults of our study showed that the serum levels of adiponectin were not significantly different between the patients with normal and abnormal nuclear scans, but the level of this hormone was significantly lower in women and in patients with diabetes. Also, none of the quantitative parameters of MPI had any signifi-cant relationships with serum adiponectin.

The present findings showed that there is no significant correlation between nuclear imaging parameters and serum levels of adiponectin, but the level of this hormone was significantly lower in the patients with diabetes and in women.