Table 1.

Brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) (also known as B-type natriuretic peptide) expression correlates with the diameter of cardiomyocytes and body weight but not with blood pressure in the ovariectomized rats fed a high-fat diet (the OF group).

Variable	Control diet		High-fat diet
	Pearson (r)	Statistical significance	Pearson (r)	Statistical significance
Plasma levels of BNP vs. diameter of cardiomyocytes	0.461	p=0.357 (ns)	0.914	p=0.004
Plasma levels of BNP vs. body weight	0.71	p=0.746 (ns)	0.890	p=0.007
Plasma levels of BNP vs. systolic blood pressure	−0.84	p=0.223 (ns)	0.726	p=0.065 (ns)

The correlations were made using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (two-tailed) among the entire population of Wistar rats fed control diet, and the whole population of Wistar rats fed a high-fat diet (n=24 for each variable). This type of correlation indicates trends or associations between variables. Statistical significance was determined to be a p-value ≤0.05. ns – not significant. r=0.10–0.30 (weak correlation), 0.40–0.60 (moderate correlation), 0.70–1.0 (strong correlation) [50].