GDF15 and cardiovascular disorder: Furthermore, several recent studies confirmed that circulating GDF-15 levels are significantly associated with increased cardiovascular risk (death and/or MACE) in patients with several cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension, atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, heart failure, myocardial infarction, and stroke [109,148,149,150,151,152,153,154,155,156,157,158,159,160,161,162,163,164,165,166,167].