Extended Data Fig. 2: Association of thymic health with long-term mortality in the Framingham Heart Study.

a, Overview of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). Each column represents one patient. The data is sorted by ascending thymic health, i.e., an imaging-based proxy for thymic functionality, from left to right. Thymic health is categorized into low, average, and high based on the bottom 25%, middle 50%, and top 25% of the population. The fractional left split of the FHS represents the patients who were defined as having low thymic health through automatic quality control. Thymic health quantification and basic clinical information are shown. b, Associations between thymic health and sex in FHS (n = 2,581), across age groups in years (n = 2,581) and body mass categories (n = 2,577, missingness n = 4) using pairwise Wilcoxon Rank Sum test. Box plots show the median (center line), interquartile range (25th–75th percentiles; box), and whiskers extending to the minimum and maximum values within 1.5 x the interquartile range. Statistical comparisons between groups were performed using two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum tests without adjustment for multiple comparisons. c, Survival of participants from the FHS without adjustments. d, Hazard ratio (HR) of death from any cause for FHS participants adjusted for smoking status and stratified by sex and age binned at 3-years. Follow-up for all analyses was 12 years. The inset in the Kaplan-Meier plot shows the same data on an expanded y-axis. c,d, Cox proportional hazards regression was used to estimate HRs. In the forest plots, the center of each box represents the estimated hazard ratio, and the whiskers denote the corresponding 95% CI; arrowheads indicate that the 95% CI extends beyond the visualized limits; shaded box size is for visualization only and does not encode statistical weight. The overall contribution of thymic health to uni- or multivariable models was evaluated using likelihood ratio tests (χ² tests) comparing full models with nested models excluding thymic health (type III test, two-sided) with no adjustments for multiple comparisons. BMI Body Mass Index, CI Confidence Interval, FHS Framingham Heart Study, HR Hazard Ratio.