LGALS3 and metabolic syndrome: In multivariate logistic regression analysis we found that OPG, dyslipidemia, galectin-3, and HOMA-IR were independent predictors for depletion in numerous of circulating EPCs and MPCs alone, as well as combined variable: EPCs and MPCs (Fig. 1), whereas the comparison of predictive models based on several biomarkers including dyslipidemia, galectin-3, and HOMA-IR has shown a lack of advantages of these models versus predictive model constructed on OPG alone (Table 2).