NPPB and type 2 diabetes mellitus: To explore the effect of each T2DM complication and treatment on the levels of sST2, hs-cTnI, and NT-proBNP, multiple MANCOVA tests followed by one-way ANOVAs with Tukey’s post-hoc tests were computed after adjustment for age, sex, and HbA1c (Additional file 1: Table S3).