In the industrialized countries, both arterial hypertension and diabetes mellitus are highly prevalent disorders that lead to a high incidence of cardiovascular disease, cutting across all ethnic, racial and gender groups (Benjamin 2002). This in turn is the leading cause of death and disability, and outnumbers deaths from all sorts of cancers combined (AHA 2001). Consequently, hypertension and diabetes are among the most valuable targets of health care activities. This is particularly important for diabetic patients, whose main problems are macrovascular and not primarily microvascular complications. For example, in the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS) fatal cardiovascular events were 70 times more frequent than fatal microvascular complications (Turner 1996). An analysis from the Tecumseh study estimated that the elimination of the cardiovascular risk from diabetes in just 60% of the affected population — an achievable goal — would reduce the 8-year predicted incidence of coronary heart disease as much as would the combined elimination of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and smoking in the diabetic populations (Smith 1996). In other words, the risk factor diabetes itself is of much greater importance than the other factors mentioned.