Potentially Spurious Correlations Between Arterial Size, Flow-Mediated Dilation, and Shear Rate

In this paper, we examined the correlations between percent flow-mediated dilation, baseline diameter, and shear rate. We found that the widely reported correlations between flow-mediated dilation, basal artery diameter, and shear rate have a substantial spurious component because percent flow-mediated dilation and shear rate are mathematically coupled to artery size.