NOX4 and diabetic kidney disease: Microvascular complications are equally driven by oxidative damage i.e., in diabetic retinopathy, ROS-induced VEGF overexpression through HIF-1α stabilization leads to pathological angiogenesis (Kowluru and Mishra, 2017), while in diabetic nephropathy, podocyte injury results from NOX4-derived O2•− and mitochondrial ROS-mediated apoptosis (Jha et al., 2024).