With respect to individual metabolites, we first calculated the difference between baseline and 1-year concentrations, then normalized this difference with the inverse normal transformation. For 1-year changes in the BCAA score, we summed 1-year changes of the 3 metabolites and normalized the sum.
An inverse normal transformation was applied to raw values of leucine, isoleucine, and valine, and a weighted sum of these 3 values was computed to calculate the BCAAscore.