A new paper, this time venturing into the field of the so-called heart-brain interaction. We often see stroke patients with cardiac problems, and vice versa. And to make it even more complex, there is also a link to dementia! What to make of this? Is it a case of chicken and the egg, or just confounding by a third variable? How do these diseases influence each other?
This paper tries to get a grip on this matter by zooming in on a marker of cardiac damage, i.e. cardiac troponin T. We looked at this marker in our stroke patients. Logically, stroke patients do not have increased levels of troponin T, yet, they do. More interestingly, the patients that exhibit high levels of this biomarker also have high level of structural changes in the brain, so called cerebral white matter lesions.
But the problem is that patients with high levels of troponin T are different from those who have no marker of cardiac damage. They are older and have more comorbidities, so a classic case for adjustment for confounding, right? But then we realize that both troponin as well as white matter lesions are a left skewed data. Log transformation of the variables before you run linear regression, but then the interpretation of the results get a bit complex if you want clear point estimates as answers to your research question.
So we decided to go with a quantile regression, which models the quantile cut offs with all the multivariable regression benefits. The results remain interpretable and we don’t force our data into distribution where it doesn’t fit. From our paper:
In contrast to linear regression analysis, quantile regression can compare medians rather than means, which makes the results more robust to outliers [21]. This approach also allows to model different quantiles of the dependent variable, e.g. 80th percentile. That way, it is possible to investigate the association between hs-cTnT in relation to both the lower and upper parts of the WML distribution. For this study, we chose to perform a median quantile regression analysis, as well as quantile regression analysis for quintiles of WML (i.e. 20th, 40th, 60th and 80th percentile). Other than that, the regression coefficients indicate the effects of the covariate on the cut-offs of the respective quantiles of the dependent variable, adjusted for potential covariates, just like in any other regression model.
Interestingly, the result show that association between high troponin T and white matter lesions is the strongest in the higher quantiles. If you want to stretch to a causal statement that means that high troponin T has a more pronounced effect on white matter lesions in stroke patients who are already at the high end of the distribution of white matter lesions.
But we should’t stretch it that far. This is a relative simple study, and the clinical relevance of our insights still needs to be established. For example, our unadjusted results might indicate that the association in itself might be strong enough to help predict post stroke cognitive decline. The adjusted numbers are less pronounced, but still, it might be enough to help prediction models.
The paper, led by RvR, is now published in J of Neurol, and can be found here, as well as on my mendeley profile.
von Rennenberg R, Siegerink B, Ganeshan R, Villringer K, Doehner W, Audebert HJ, Endres M, Nolte CH, Scheitz JF. High-sensitivity cardiac troponin T and severity of cerebral white matter lesions in patients with acute ischemic stroke. J Neurol Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2018; 0: 0.
bob siegerink 