View clinical trials related to Atherosclerosis.
Filter by:The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a link between calcium build up in the veins or arteries (including the veins/arteries of the heart) and deterioration of the bone. This will help understand if there is a connection between heart disease and bone disease.
It is the investigators aim to determine the feasibility of directly detecting anti-RLIP76 auto-antibodies in human serum using prepared RLIP76 antigen peptides in persons with rheumatologic disease and persons without rheumatologic diesease ("healthy subjects").
The purpose of the study is to determine if short term (6 months) treatment with statins to lower low-density lipoprotein (LDL) in vascular disease patients with carotid plaque will be associated with a measurable reduction in carotid plaque volume using 3 Tesla MRI. The researchers will correlate the change in plaque volume to degree of LDL lowering. The researchers will also study if brief treatment will lead to change in plaque composition. The researchers will compare the change in plaque volume measured by 3T MRI with plaque burden measured by ultrasound.
In recent years, medical research into the cause and progression of heart disease due to narrowing and blockage of blood vessels to the heart muscle has improved the understanding of ischemic heart disease. It is now accepted that both the development and later progression with sudden blockage of blood vessels are associated with inflammation, although it remains unknown exactly what triggers this inflammatory process. It is possible that new blood tests which measure markers of inflammation in the bloodstream may be useful to help identify patients at risk of heart damage and assess response to treatment. The study plans to assess a new blood test for a known marker of inflammation (IL-4) in patients with heart disease. The hypothesis of this study is that, the cytokine, IL-4, measured by a new assay, is abnormally elevated in the blood of patients with coronary artery disease. Also hypothesized is that the degree of abnormality of blood IL-4, is related to important clinical events in such patients, including severity of disease, acute complications, and treatment.
Rupture of unstable atherosclerotic plaques is the underlying pathophysiologic mechanism of acute coronary syndromes and thus also of perioperative myocardial ischemia. Lipid lowering drugs such as statins and fibrates have been shown to improve the outcomes of patients with atherosclerosis. This is not only mediated through their therapeutic actions on lipid metabolism, but relies on a multitude of pleiotropic effects of these substances. One of the most interesting of these effects is the stabilisation of atherosclerotic plaques. To investigate these effects in a perioperative setting, patients scheduled for thromboendarterectomy of the carotid artery will be recruited. They will be randomised to receive either atorvastatin 10mg/d, gemfibrozil 1200mg/d or placebo for two weeks preoperatively. Specimens of carotid plaques will be obtained intraoperatively. After microscopic characterisation of plaques, DNA-microarray analyses will be done to gain insights into the transcriptional regulation and expression profiles of various types of atherosclerotic plaques under different pharmacological circumstances (stable or unstable with statin/fibrate/placebo).