NO-mediated stimulation of soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) and consequent production of cyclic GMP (cGMP) plays an important role in the prevention of diabetic nephropathy, neuropathy, cardiomyopathy and the endothelial dysfunction promoting atherosclerosis, as can be judged by the fact that treatment with drugs that directly stimulate sGC or that inhibit phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5, which selectively degrades cGMP) is protective with respect to these complications in rodent diabetes models [211,212,213,214,215,216,217,218,219,220,221,222,223,224,225,226]. This evidence concerns the gene SGCB and atherosclerosis.