Characteristics of control patients and CKD patients, the latter also split into patients not requiring and requiring hemodialysis.

Data are means ± SD for normally distributed continuous data or median (Q1;Q3) for non-normally distributed continuous data, categorical data are presented as n (%). Continuous data were evaluated by unpaired two-tailed t-tests for comparisons between control patients and all CKD patients. Continuous data were evaluated by oneway ANOVA followed by Bonferroni or Games-Howell (in case of non-equal variances) tests (normally distributed data) or Kruskall-Wallis followed by Mann-Whitney tests (non-normally distributed data) for comparisons between control patients, CKD patients requiring hemodialysis and CKD patients not requiring hemodialysis. Categorical data were evaluated by chi-square or Fisher exact tests.*p†p