VEGFA and diabetes mellitus: Importantly, our data are consistent with VEGF-A’s well-established role as a paracrine factor produced by hypoxic/ischemic tissue (see also Figure 7), for instance by astrocytes during central nervous system inflammatory disease (Argaw et al., 2012) and pathological retinal angiogenesis (Weidemann et al., 2010) or by Müller cells during diabetes-induced retinal ischemia (Wang et al., 2010).