Safety and tolerability of lumbar puncture for the evaluation of Alzheimer's disease

INTRODUCTION: Lumbar puncture (LP) to collect and examine cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is an important option for the evaluation of Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers but it is not routinely performed due to its invasiveness and link to adverse effects (AE). METHODS: We include all participants who received at least one LP in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) Study. For comparison between groups, two‐sample t‐tests for continuous, and Pearson's chi‐square test for categorical variables were performed. RESULTS: Two hundred twenty‐seven LP‐related AEs were reported by 172 participants after 1702 LPs (13.3%). The mean age of participants who reported at least one AE was 69.79 (standard deviation (SD) 6.3) versus none 72.44 (7.17) years (p < 0.001) with female predominance (115/172 = 67.4% vs 435/913 = 48%), and had greater entorhinal cortical thickness and hippocampal volume (3.903 (0.782) vs 3.684 (0.775) mm, p = 0.002; 7.38 (1.06) vs 7.05 (1.15) mm(3), p < 0.001), respectively. DISCUSSION: We found that younger age, female sex, and greater thickness of the entorhinal cortex were associated with a higher rate of LP‐related AE reports.