Although those reports tended to emphasise the role of urate in developing hypertension [31, 32], in the present study urate was associated with fasting insulin (r = 0.21) and only weakly with systolic or diastolic BP (r = 0.11 and 0.08, respectively), although a large Mendelian randomisation study suggested that urate had no causal role in the development of type 2 diabetes [33]. Here, INS is linked to type 2 diabetes mellitus.