Administration of systemic retinoids such as acitretin has not been approved yet for
pediatric patients. An adverse event of retinoid-therapy that occurs with lower prevalence in children
than in adults is hyperlipidemia. This might be based on the lack of comorbidities in young patients,
but must not be neglected. Especially for the development of the human brain up to young adulthood,
dysbalance of lipids might be deleterious. Here, we provide for the first time an in-depth analysis
of the influence of subchronic acitretin-administration on lipid composition of brain parenchyma of
young wild type mice. For comparison and to evaluate the systemic effect of the treatment, liver lipids
were analogously investigated. As expected, triglycerides increased in liver as well as in brain and a
non-significant increase in cholesterol was observed. However, specifically brain showed an increase
in lyso-phosphatidylcholine and carnitine as well as in sphingomyelin. Group analysis of lipid
classes revealed no statistical effects, while single species were tissue-dependently changed: effects
in brain were in general more subtly as compared to those in liver regarding the mere number of
changed lipid species. Thus, while the overall impact of acitretin seems comparably small regarding
brain, the change in individual species and their role in brain development and maturation has to
be considered