Despite heterogeneity in clinical and demographic characteristics, differences in baseline ET-1 between infected versus non-infected patients and all patient categories remained significant (p < 0.05) in corrected models for age, gender, ethnicity, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, diabetes, congestive cardiac failure and chronic kidney disease using between-subjects effect analysis of co-variance (Table 2). This evidence concerns the gene EDN1 and Hypertension.