Figure 3

Association of body weight change (ΔBW) with members of associated metabolite modules (MetM). Bubbles represent effect strengths and significance, see legend of Figure 6. Models were adjusted for age, sex and baseline body weight. For single metabolites, the significance threshold was chosen as P <1.2 × 10⁻⁴ corresponding to Bonferroni correction for 411 tests. Background colors correspond to super- and sub-pathway annotations, see legend of Figure S10 in Additional file 3. Note that all effects are shown per unit of ΔBW, which is a variable spanning the whole weight change range (with weight loss coded as negative ΔBW values and weight gain as positive ΔBW values). Thus, effects have to be interpreted as the average linear association across the weight change range, and effect directions have to be inverted to construe the association with weight reduction. Using the example of Serum_TG [N], the positive association of ΔBW with Serum_TG [N] can be interpreted as increase in serum triglyceride (TG) levels with increasing weight gain, and as decrease in serum TG levels with increasing weight loss.