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. 2020 Mar 19;10:5006. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-61801-w

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Causal mediation framework. (a) The effect of exposure X on outcome Y without taking into account mediator M is known as the “total effect”. (b) The effect of X on Y not via M is known as the “direct effect”, and the effect through M is the “indirect effect”. (c) X, M, Y are body mass index /waist-to-height ratio, glycoprotein acetyls (GlycA) and retinal arteriolar/venular calibre in the current study. Confounders included in the analysis were not shown in the figure.