RESEARCH ARTICLE


Novel Risk Factors for Atherosclerosis



Athanasia Papazafiropoulou, Nicholas Katsilambros , Nicholas Tentolouris *
Athens University Medical School, 1st Department of Propaedutic Medicine, Laiko General Hospital, 17 Ag. Thoma Street, 115 27 Athens, Greece


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Creative Commons License
© 2008 Papazafiropoulou et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Athens University Medical School, 1st Department of Propaedutic Medicine, Laiko General Hospital, 17 Ag. Thoma Street, 115 27 Athens, Greece; Tel: +30 210 745 6448; Fax: +30 210 746 2640; E-mail: ntentol@med.uoa.gr


Abstract

Epidemiologic studies demonstrated that the classical cardiovascular risk factors explain only a part of the increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Large scale studies have shown that novel cardiovascular risk factors, including increased plasma homocysteine, fibrinogen, C-reactive protein, uric acid levels, and increased white blood cells count as well as low adiponectin levels, might have a key role in the pathogenesis of the cardiovascular disease. This review examines recent literature data on the effect of novel risk factors on cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in healthy subjects as well as in subjects at high cardiovascular risk. In addition, the pathogenetic mechanisms linking the effects of the novel risk factors with atherosclerosis are discussed.

Keywords: Cardiovascular disease, risk factors, novel, white blood cells, fibrinogen, uric acid, homocysteine, adiponectin, C-reactive protein.