Fig. 1

Summary of the workflow followed in the present study. For increased validity, subjects were divided randomly into discovery and test sets. After proteomic analysis of the plasma specimens, pathway annotation was performed for the discovery set proteins and their abundance was correlated with the respective plasma concentrations in the plasma proteome database. Differentially expressed proteins were defined with the following criteria: case/control ratio ≥ 2 or ≤ 0.5; Mann–Whitney p-value ≤ 0.05; protein identifications based on multiple peptides. The differentially expressed proteins with identical expression trend in both sets were shortlisted and extensive literature mining was performed. The resulting validated dataset consists of proteins previously found associated with CVD and novel findings to be further investigated in the context of CVD pathophysiology