This paper provides an overview of rheumatoid disease from the perspective of its impact on mortality. The term, rheumatoid arthritis, may promote the misconception that this disease is relatively trivial and easily managed; therefore, "rheumatoid disease" is preferred. Numerous long-term studies in many settings have established that significant excess mortality is associated with rheumatoid d...

CONTEXT There are few data directly comparing the effects of physical activity and body weight on cardiovascular biomarkers. OBJECTIVE To examine the association of physical activity and body mass index (BMI, defined as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters) alone and in combination with cardiovascular biomarkers. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Cross-sectional ana...

In primary prevention, traditional risk factors are a useful first step in the determination of who could be at risk for cardiovascular events. In the era of “global risk assessment” scores such as the Framingham score, the Prospective Cardiovascular Münster (PROCAM) score, or the European Society of Cardiology Systematic Coronary Risk Evaluation (SCORE), which are derived from multivariable st...

AIMS To assess the joint influence of inflammatory biomarkers on the risk of incident atrial fibrillation (AF) in women. METHODS AND RESULTS We performed a prospective cohort study among women participating in the Women's Health Study. All women were free of AF at study entry and provided a baseline blood sample assayed for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, soluble intercellular adhesion m...

BACKGROUND Most investigations of novel biomarkers for prediction of cardiovascular disease pertain to coronary artery disease. Few large-scale prospective studies have critically assessed plasma-based factors as predictors of peripheral arterial disease (PAD), and comparative data between individual biomarkers and lipid levels are sparse, especially among women. METHODS AND RESULTS We evalua...

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the general population; traditional risk factors seem inadequate to explain completely the remarkable prevalence of cardiovascular mortality and morbidity observed in the uremic population. A role for chronic inflammation has been well established in the development of atherosclerotic disease, and, on the basis of these observations, ather...

historically, biomarkers have been used in two major ways to maintain and improve better health status: first, for diagnostic purposes, and second, as specific targets to treat various diseases.   a new era in treatment and even cure for the some diseases using reprograming of somatic cells is about to be born. in this approach, scientists are successfully taking human skin cells (previously co...

Background Cardiac biomarkers have become increasingly important in cardiovascular disease. With the ability to detect focal and diffuse myocardial fibrosis, CMR is an important imaging biomarker. Diffuse myocardial fibrosis, reflected by increased extracellular volume (ECV), may underlie increased cardiovascular risk. ECV could provide a novel tool to evaluate the association myocardial-specif...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a major cause of premature death in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), including renal transplant recipients. Both interplay of traditional cardiovascular and renal specific risk factors have been shown to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular death in patients with CKD. Recently, there has been great interest in the role of novel b...

In contemporary cardiovascular practice, the most common and useful applications of biomarkers focus on disease diagnosis, with troponins for myocardial infarction and natriuretic peptides for heart failure representing the most notable examples. Identification of additional cardiovascular diagnostic markers has proved challenging, however, because high quality studies for diagnostic indication...