Fig. 3 Correlation of cognitive function with the circulatory AD plasma proteome. a Proteins that exhibit significant correlation between cognitive function (evaluated by MMSE = Mini-mental state examination score) and protein levels ranked by correlation (cutoff p rho < 0.05, Spearman rank correlation; p perm based on 1000 MMSE-score permutations; dashed red line indicates p perm = 0.05 threshold). Many proteins are part of TGFβ/GDF/BMP, complement, or apoptosis signaling. b Example scattergrams of the top positive and negative MMSE-correlated proteins (red line indicates regression with 95 % confidence intervals). c Network representation of significantly correlated proteins after integration with known pathway and physical interaction data reveals many densely connected hits in pathways related to TGFβ/GDF/BMP, complement, and apoptosis signaling