June 10, 2004
NUTRITION NEWS FOCUS
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Today's Topic: Inflammation Predicts Heart Disease

More evidence continues to accumulate implicating chronic, low-grade
inflammation in the development of cardiovascular disease.  The latest
study included 28,000 apparently healthy women who were followed for
three years.  One hundred twenty-two had heart attacks or stroke and
they were compared with 244 women free of symptoms.

Many factors distinguished the two groups; higher values were found in
the heart disease group for body-mass index, hypertension, diabetes,
parental history of heart disease, cholesterol, LDL cholesterol,
lipoprotein (a), homocysteine, and 5 separate indicators of
inflammation.  After statistically adjusting for the other factors,
only one measure of inflammation independently predicted risk:
C-reactive protein.  The study appeared in the March 23, 2000 New
England Journal of Medicine.
< http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/342/12/836 >

HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Half of all heart attacks
occur in people with normal cholesterol levels.  Inflammation is
another piece of the puzzle in understanding how to prevent and treat
heart disease. Your Advisor was the first to demonstrate that white
blood cells were the source of the fat filled cells in the arteries
from people; this was published in Archives of Pathology and
Laboratory Medicine in 1985.  For decades, scientists thought that the
cells were muscle cells from the artery wall itself, and the
inflammation observation changed the way researchers thought about
progression of the disease.


(This story originally appeared in Nutrition News Focus on
April 7, 2000.)