Systolic blood pressure (SBP) was measured biweekly by tail-cuff (XBP1000 system Kent Scientific, Torrington, CT) (Cheng et al., 2009 (link)). Plasma creatinine was assayed using the DetectX® Serum Creatinine kit (Arbor assays, Ann Arbor, MI)(Kim, Jiang, et al., 2019 (link)) and plasma activin-A by a Quantikine ELISA kit (R&D) (Kim, Puranik, et al., 2021 (link)).