Table 3.

Correlation between biomarker levels in the total population, healthy individuals, and patients with EOA or LOA

Biomarkers	Total population		Healthy		EOA		LOA
	r	p	r	p	r	p	r	p
COMP vs HA	0.121	> 0.05	0.072	> 0.05	0.017	> 0.05	0.177	< 0.05
COMP vs PIICP	−0.184	< 0.01	0.086	> 0.05	0.448	< 0.01	−0.307	< 0.0001
PIICP vs HA	−0.030	> 0.05	0.050	> 0.05	−0.117	> 0.05	0.123	> 0.05

EOA Early Osteoarthritis, LOA Late Osteoarthritis. Correlation analysis between biomarker levels was performed using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (r). All reported p-values are two-tailed. p-values < 0.05 were considered statistically significant and indicated in bold