Additionally, elevated plasmalogen levels could compensate for the alterations in other mitochondrial lipids, which could improve membrane structure (Paltauf, 1994; Gorgas et al., 2006).
In the future it would be interesting to reveal how much plasmalogen levels are actually able to change the biophysical properties of native lipid membranes where a mixture of different lipid species exists.
Given this relationship, serum plasmalogen levels have even been used to successfully stratify diseased patients (Wood et al., 2016).
Rescue of plasmalogen levels by alkyl glycerol treatment prevented hepatic steatosis and NASH through PPARα-dependent increase in fatty acid oxidation, suggesting a role for endogenous plasmalogen production in PPARα signaling (Jang et al., 2017).
Conversely, serum plasmalogen levels increase in men with aerobic training and in patients with a healthy dietary intervention (Lankinen et al., 2016; Felder et al., 2017).
However, serum plasmalogen levels are decreased in patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) as compared to healthy controls (Puri et al., 2009).
This in turn decreases AGPS (the rate-limiting enzyme of ether lipid synthesis) activity, ultimately lowering plasmalogen levels (Grimm et al., 2011).
Red blood cells and fibroblasts collected from schizophrenia patients were recently shown to be significantly decreased in plasmalogen levels (Tessier et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2016).
In this respect, our study provides a novel insight in that nicotine affects plasmalogen levels.
Overall, it was shown that newborn plasmalogen levels are relatively low (7% of total phospholipid mass) [32].
