Table 4.

Association of biomarker levels with age, BMI, KL grade, and knee pain

Variable	Biomarker
	sCOMP		sHA		sPIICP
	r	p-value	r	p-value	r	p-value
Age	0.2574	0.0002	0.2523	0.0002	−0.5807	< 0.0001
BMI	0.2150	0.0016	−0.0921	0.1818	−0.2225	0.0011
KL grade	0.2417	0.0004	0.1399	0.0419	−0.6776	< 0.0001
Resting VAS	0.1607	0.0192	0.0263	0.7029	−0.4442	< 0.0001
Walking VAS	0.0624	0.3657	0.0059	0.9314	−0.4184	< 0.0001

Correlation analysis between biomarker levels and the variables 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