Because of this, our significant associations with age for different pathways could be related as a common underlying effect on a given set of genes.
Moreover, the trend indicators were likely highly statistically significant because of our large study size, which can make moderate or even small associations statistically significant.
We believe that these small differences were significant because of our large sample size (N = 1,816).
The value of chi-square was significant because of our large sample size (×=77.99, df=31, and p<0.0001).
Because some of our traits showed significant departure from a Brownian motion model of evolution (see Results), we did not compute the evolutionary variance-covariance matrix based on a Brownian motion model of evolution but rather on a matrix corrected by the lambda parameter (see below; [ 24, 27, 46]).
This effect, well reported in smooth muscle cells in pulmonary hypertension [ 27] is not significant probably because of our small number samples.
We also found evidence suggestive of an inverse association between O3 and sperm concentration and count, although the effect was not statistically significant, possibly because of our relatively smaller sample size.
We also considered the possibility that we observed our significant interactions because of associations between the sitting SBP, DBP, and mean arterial pressure effects alone, but analysis confirmed no significant association for any of the SNPs that met our criteria.
We used multivariate analysis in our study because of the significant difference in the severity of illness at baseline between the two groups.
In addition, the reduction in absolute CVD risk may be underestimated in our study because of the significant reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked per day in this cohort [ 33].
