INS and atherosclerosis: There are several studies that suggest that high insulin concentrations are associated with typical pathologies of the metabolic syndrome, such as insulin resistance [91,92,93,94,95,96,97], obesity [98,99,100,101,102,103], hypertension, cardiovascular diseases [104,105,106,107,108], atherosclerosis [109], and hepatic steatosis [110,111].