Serum Fatty Acid Profiles Across Normoglycemia, Prediabetes, and Type 2 Diabetes: Associations with Glycemic and Cardiometabolic Parameters in a Kazakh Population

Population-specific data on serum fatty acids across the progression to type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) are limited. In this exploratory cross-sectional study, serum fatty acids were determined by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry in 177 adults from Kazakhstan (45 normoglycemic, 114 with prediabetes, 18 with T2DM) and expressed as percentages of the quantified profile of the 13 components detected in ≥50% of samples. No fatty acid differed between glycemic groups after false discovery rate correction. In controls and participants with prediabetes, oleic and palmitoleic acids correlated with serum triglycerides (ρ = +0.65 and +0.32; q ≤ 0.005), and both associations persisted after adjustment for age, sex and adiposity and after exclusion of implausible profiles arising from a peak-assignment inconsistency. Across all participants, linoleic acid correlated inversely with glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c; ρ = −0.21, q = 0.033) in unadjusted analyses only. An association of heptadecanoic acid with HbA1c depended on its non-detection in part of the samples and was neither established nor excluded. Covariates were not recorded for the T2DM group, HbA1c was recorded with limited precision for most participants, and adjusted analyses were restricted to 107 participants without diabetes. The study describes serum fatty acid composition in this population and generates hypotheses.