Higher differentiation of circulating monocytes into metabolically activated macrophages (MMe) in dyslipidemia.
Since the population of MMe has been recently described, there is of interest to consider different subpopulation levels based on the expression of one, two or three metabolic markers. When we compared MMe obtained from culture from dyslipidemia and from healthy subjects, we found that the percentage of differentiated MMe from the group with dyslipidemia is higher than the percentage from the control group (Fig 5A) when macrophages were evaluated with 2 (p= 0.0249, 2.71%, 2.05%-3.31% vs 3.41%, 2.3%-5.08%, median and IQR) or 3 metabolic markers (p= 0.0340, 2.08%±1.14% vs 2.88%±1.35%, arithmetic mean and SD). Moreover, in dyslipidemia subjects, we observed a positive correlation between the BMI and the percentage of MMe (p= 0.0401, r= 0.4217; Fig 5B). Nevertheless, there was no relationship between the monocyte derived-MMe percentage and blood lipid levels either in dyslipidemia patients (NS; Fig 5C) or control subjects. Despite an expected relationship between ABCA1 median fluorescence intensity (MFI) and HDLc levels (Fig 5D), no significant correlation was observed between these parameters in dyslipidemia subjects (p= 0.9133). Interestingly, there was a positive correlation between ABCA1 MFI and LDLc concentrations (p= 0.0019, r= 0.5897; Fig 5D). Regarding macrophages M1 and M2 monocytes differentiated in presence of GM-CSF, LPS and IFN-γ or M-CSF and IL-4, respectively, we found no difference in the percentages of neither M1 nor M2 macrophages, between controls and patients with dyslipidemia (NS; Fig 5E).