EDN1 and heart failure: BNP is used for the diagnosis of heart failure and cardiac dysfunction (de Lemos et al. 2003; Ruskoaho 2003) and its synthesis in cardiomyocytes is induced by cellular stress such as mechanical stretch (Pikkarainen et al. 2003), hypoxia (Toth et al. 1994), and metabolic stress (Bistola et al. 2008), as well as various paracrine signals such as endothelin-1 (Bruneau et al. 1997) and cytokines (Ma et al. 2004).