Brownlee, in the transcript of his 2004 Banting Lecture, includes a brief section entitled:
How does the unifying mechanism explain diabetic macrovascular disease?
The bulk of the lecture was devoted to explaining microvascular disease as complications of diabetes (i.e. hyperglycemia), but he recognized that macrovascular disease is NOT driven by hyperglycemia. Of course, since then this fact has been demonstrated (or at least suggested) in many ways by more recent large studies.
Brownlee (in the 2004 lecture) introduced a theory for how insulin resistance of the endothelial cells might cause CVD.
This seems to have been much ignored since then -- almost a decade ago.
Maybe this can provide a suggestion for follow-on research by the Colorado group.