ACE and diabetes mellitus: We further performed ANCOVA to examine the main effect of stroke on HRV after multivariate adjustment for age, sex, current smoking habits, diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, ultrafiltration percentage, cardiothoracic ratio > 0.5, log-transformed hs-CRP, and use of ACE inhibitors or ARBs, beta-blockers, and calcium channel blockers.