Fig. 4
Proteins associated with BBB disruption and TBI-induced protein level alterations were outcome predictors following TBI. Using the hierarchical clustering depicted in Fig. 3d, QA associated proteins significantly different between clusters were derived. Of these, n = 90 proteins were found to overlap with proteins altered in CSF following TBI as portrayed in Fig. 2c (a). Similar assessments between CSF clusters and TBI-induced protein alterations in serum yielded an overlap of n = 32 proteins (b). Among these, n = 40 proteins comprised novel outcome predictors following severe TBI, of which an excerpt of proteins with different features are shown (c, d). These analyses were multivariable, meaning that outcome predictors are independently significant even when adjusting for previously known prognostic covariates following a severe TBI. Validation of results were conducted in an independent TBI cohort without CSF samples. Following TBI, many of the matched cohort outcome proteins were upregulated in this validation cohort as well (e). CSF cerebrospinal fluid, MFI median fluorescence intensity, TBI traumatic brain injury. All full protein names are given in Additional file 3: Table S1