C1QTNF3 and hypertrophy: In vitro, CTRP3 directly induces hypertrophy in cardiomyocytes and the underlying mechanism is that CTRP3 exacerbates cardiac hypertrophy via the TGF β-activated kinase 1 (TAK1)-c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) axis which is activated by PKA (Ma et al., 2019).