BACKGROUND Geographic variation in traditional cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors has been observed among women in the US. It is not known whether state-level variation in cardiovascular inflammation exists or could be explained by traditional clinical risk factors and behavioral lifestyle factors. METHODS AND RESULTS We used multilevel linear regression to estimate state-level variati...

BACKGROUND Cardiac troponin T and brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) are elevated in >50% of dialysis patients and are associated with poor outcomes. Few data investigated these associations in earlier chronic kidney disease (CKD). METHODS AND RESULTS We studied whether CKD modified associations of elevated BNP, N-terminal-pro-BNP, high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T, coronary artery calcificati...

BACKGROUND Data supporting a link between body-fat distribution changes and cardiovascular disease risk in HIV-infected patients are scarce and contradictory. We evaluated endothelial dysfunction, an early event in the development of atherosclerosis, and pro-atherosclerotic plasma biomarkers in HIV-infected patients with lipodystrophy. METHODS HIV-infected patients with and without lipodystro...

INTRODUCTION Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic autoimmune disease. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is common and a major cause of mortality. Studies on cardiovascular morbidity are abundant, whereas mortality studies focusing on cardiovascular outcomes are scarce. The aim of this study was to investigate causes of death and baseline predictors of overall (OM), non-vascular (N-VM), an...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the major cause of death in patients with advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD). Recent studies have suggested that novel risk factors, uremia- or dialysis-related, are of great importance, as they act synergistically with the highly prevalent traditional risk factors for CVD in CKD patients. Whereas an ideal single biomarker, i.e., one that adds relevant prognos...

Prediction of future cardiovascular events (CVEs) and death by combinations of traditional risk factors yields inaccurate risk estimates, despite advancements in statistical methods and modeling. As a significant proportion of CVE occurs in subjects stratified into low-intermediate risk categories, the sake for cardiovascular risk biomarkers has attracted great interest. An ideal cardiovascular...

The use of biomarkers to augment traditional cardiovascular risk prediction has attracted considerable attention in the past decade. This interest has been fueled by the realization that traditional risk factors do not identify everyone who will eventually develop cardiovascular disease.1 This has been accompanied by the emergence of potential screening tests such as high-sensitivity C-reactive...

The use of biomarkers to augment traditional cardiovascular risk prediction has attracted considerable attention in the past decade. This interest has been fueled by the realization that traditional risk factors do not identify everyone who will eventually develop cardiovascular disease.1 This has been accompanied by the emergence of potential screening tests such as high-sensitivity C-reactive...

The early identification of susceptibility to adverse cardiovascular outcomes and risk stratification amongst asymptomatic individuals, as well as amongst those with overt disease continues to be one of the major priorities of clinically-orientated research in the field of atherothrombosis (Dotsenko et al., 2008). Conventional cardiovascular risk assessment is based on traditional risk factors ...