OBJECTIVE The American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association have issued guidelines indicating that the contribution of apolipoprotein B-100 (ApoB) to cardiovascular risk assessment remains uncertain. The present analysis evaluates whether lipoprotein particle measures convey risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) in 4679 Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) participants. ...

BACKGROUND Biomarkers of atherosclerosis may refine clinical decision making in individuals at risk of cardiovascular disease. The purpose of the study was to determine the prognostic significance of endothelial function and other vascular markers in apparently healthy men. METHODS AND RESULTS The cohort consisted of 1574 men (age, 49.4 years) free of vascular disease. Measurements included f...

RESULTSdDuring an average of 2.6 years of follow-up, 153 men (18.4%) and 199 women (16.4%) developed metabolic syndrome. In multivariable-adjusted models, the odds ratio for incident metabolic syndrome comparing the highest with the lowest quartiles of adiponectin levels was 0.25 (95% CI 0.14–0.47) in men and 0.45 (0.28–0.74) in women. While serum adiponectin did not improve the area under the ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the capacity of the postcoital test (PCT) to predict spontaneous pregnancy in a large cohort study of subfertile couples. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING Department of reproductive medicine of 38 hospitals in the Netherlands. PATIENT(S) Between January 2002 and February 2004, we prospectively included consecutive subfertile couples who had not been evaluated previo...

BACKGROUND Correct estimation of renal function is crucial in assessing prognosis of patients with heart failure (HF). Recently, two new equations have been proposed to calculate estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) with cystatin C alone or both creatinine and cystatin C. We assessed the prognostic value of eGFR estimated by these new equations in outpatients with HF. METHODS The study...

BACKGROUND midregional proadrenomedullin (MR-proADM) is a prognostic biomarker in patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). We sought to confirm whether MR-proADM added to Pneumonia Severity Index (PSI) improves the potential prognostic value of PSI alone, and tested to what extent this combination could be useful in predicting poor outcome of patients with CAP in an Emergency Departmen...

BACKGROUND High-sensitivity C-reactive protein and family history are independently associated with future cardiovascular events and have been incorporated into risk prediction models for women (the Reynolds Risk Score for women); however, no cardiovascular risk prediction algorithm incorporating these variables currently exists for men. METHODS AND RESULTS Among 10 724 initially healthy Amer...

OBJECTIVES The study tested whether extreme lipoprotein(a) levels and/or corresponding LPA risk genotypes improve myocardial infarction (MI) and coronary heart disease (CHD) risk prediction beyond conventional risk factors. BACKGROUND Elevated lipoprotein(a) levels cause MI and CHD. Levels are primarily determined by variation in the LPA gene. METHODS We followed 8,720 Danish participants i...

Background Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 1500 disease-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), including many related to atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD). Associations have been found for most traditional risk factors (TRFs), including lipids,1,2 blood pressure/hypertension,3,4 weight/body mass index,5,6 smoking behavior,7 and diabetes.8–...

PURPOSE Since the introduction of the Framingham Risk Score (FRS), numerous versions of coronary heart disease (CHD) prediction models have claimed improvement over the FRS. Tzoulaki et al challenged the validity of these claims by illustrating methodology deficiencies among the studies. However, the question remains: Is it possible to create a new CHD model that is better than FRS while overco...