This prompted human epidemiological studies which eventually revealed statistically significant links between elevation of plasma AVP or copeptin (i.e., released in equimolar quantities with AVP) and increased risk of developing diabetes [29,30,31], hyperglycemia [32], insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome [33,34], abdominal obesity [35], stroke, cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular events, cardiovascular death [7,36,37,38], hypertension [34] and kidney disease [38,39,40]. The gene discussed is AVP; the disease is hypertensive disorder.