HGF and acute respiratory distress syndrome: We found no correlation between abundance of these cells in circulation in ARDS patients and the plasma levels of most of the cytokines (among the 36 selected based on detectable levels in at least 70% of the ARDS patients in the cohort, data not shown), except for eotaxin (Pearson R = 0.3725, p = 0.0029), HGF (Pearson R = 0.2503, p = 0.0497), and IL-1α (Pearson R = 0.2588, p = 0.0423) (Figures 1C–E).