The included studies used different blood-derived markers of atherosclerosis, such as: high sensitivity CRP (hsCRP) [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,20], vasogenic endothelial growth factor (VEGF) [14], interleukins (IL) IL-6 and IL-18 [13], osteopontin (OPN) [15,17,18], osteoprotegerin (OPG) [15,17,18] and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) [14]. Here, VEGFA is linked to atherosclerosis.