Fig. 4

Model-based causal mediation analyses to evaluate mediation capacity of VAT on the risk of adipose tissue dysfunction and insulin resistance for CAC progression. ADE attributable direct effect, ACME attributable causal mediation effect. Mediation models were fitted using the beta coefficients extracted from Cox proportional Hazard regression models. Confidence intervals were obtained using bias-corrected accelerated non-parametric bootstrap over 1,000 resamples