Previous studies had suggested that NfL and GFAP could reflect neurodegeneration, and are associated with various neurodegenerative diseases (Stocker et al., 2022), such as neuroinflammation (Kuhle et al., 2019), brain edema–induced diseases, traumatic brain injury (Shahim et al., 2024), AD (Oeckl et al., 2019), and mental disorders (Li et al., 2019). Here, NEFL is linked to neurodegenerative disease.