VEGFA and atherosclerosis: In our opinion, the lack of interrelations between the serum VEGF level and the number of neutrophils of various subpopulations can be due to the fact that in the absence of clinically significant ischemic syndromes (patients with ASCVD were not included in the study), the serum VEGF level does not represent local tissue hypoxia, which was previously shown in examples of other diseases [29, 30].