Figure 3.

Horizontal box and whisker plots of plasma 24 metabolite panel results for clinical groups in discovery and internal validation cohorts. Comparative ranges of plasma metabolite levels for the targeted discovery and internal validation studies are displayed, allowing appraisal of metabolite results in the cognitively intact normal (orange) versus Converter_pre (light blue) groups. The box defines the interquartile range (IQR) with the vertical black line within the box representing the median value. The whiskers define the upper and lower 25% limits of the data, while the dots represent outliers (≥1.5 IQR lengths from the ends of the box). The normal group featured 53 subjects in the discovery and 20 in the internal validation cohorts, while the Converter_pre group included 18 and 10 subjects, for discovery and internal validation cohorts, respectively. Individual analytes are listed on the left vertical axis, while normalized metabolite levels are shown on the horizontal axis. All the Converter_pre analyte results are reduced in comparison to NC levels, except for three acylcarnitine species (bottom of figure), C16:2, C12:1, and C10:1, which are elevated. Note the higher variability of the internal validation set compared to the discovery set, due to less than half of the number of subjects in the former compared to the latter.