Figure 2. Correlations of baseline and statin-induced changes in LDL-cholesterol with PCSK9.
A) Endogenous levels of LDL-C and PCSK9 were measured in CAP serum samples (N=901) before simvastatin treatment and their correlations were calculated for the complete dataset (Spearman’s ρ=0.089, p=0.0073) and for males (Spearman’s ρ=0.032, p=0.50) and females (Spearman’s ρ=0.15, p=0.0021) separately. Trendlines from linear regression are shown for each gender. B) Statin-induced changes (log(Statin)-log(Baseline)) in LDL-C were compared to corresponding changes in PCSK9 using Spearman’s rank-order correlation (Spearman’s ρ= −0.16, p=8.7×10−7). For illustrative purposes, one point (coordinates 0.236, −2.773) was not shown, but this point was included in statistical analyses. Linear regression trendline is shown.