Fig. 1

Leucocyte telomere length in controls and in patients with septic shock (a); LTL in septic shock patients with or without septic myocardial dysfunction (b); Focused principal component analysis (FCPA) for the association between leucocyte telomere length on the one hand, and sepsis mediators, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), Simplified Acute Physiology Score II (SAPS II), lactate clearance (Δ lactate) and survival on the other hand (c); LTL at day-1 and day-2 in patients with septic shock according to intensive care unit survival (d). FPCA is a simple graphical display of correlation structures focusing on a particular dependent variable. The display reflects primarily the correlations between the dependent variable and all other variables (covariates) and secondarily the correlations among the covariates. The dependent variable (LTL) is at the center of the diagram, and the distance of this point to a covariate faithfully represents their pairwise Spearman correlation coefficient (using ranked values of continuous variables). Green covariates are positively correlated with the dependent variable. Covariates significantly correlated with the dependent variable (with a p value < 0.05) are inside the red circle. The diagram also shows relationships between covariates as follows: correlated covariates are close (for positive correlations) or diametrically opposite vis-à-vis the origin (for negative correlations), whereas independent covariates make a right angle with the origin