CRP and Hypertension: Of the covariates that could not be balanced, age, sex, tHcy (when a covariate), and CRP were treated as individual variables, while the remaining ones were subjected to PCA to identify three components (details in Supplementary Material C, C.2, Figure S3): “Blood pressure” (actual blood pressure, pre-existing hypertension), “Renal-BNP” (creatinine, urea, and NT-proBNP), and “Lipid” (LDL-C, triglycerides).