What was the origin of the idea that inflammation might play an important role in heart disease?
The idea that inflammation might be important for atherosclerosis goes back almost 70 years, in many ways predating the cholesterol hypothesis. That inflammation was critical to the initiation and progression of atherothrombosis was re-discovered by the vascular biology community about 15 years ago, with Russell Ross, now deceased, being a guiding light in this field. The influence of this work was enormous for the direction of our research group, because we began to ask how we might translate this molecular information about inflammation into a population setting where we could actually test it. So that began a whole series of NIH-funded studies, starting in 1994, in which we began to ask whether there were molecular biomarkers of inflammation, measurable on a population basis, that we could use to predict heart disease in large-scale prospective cohortsin tens of thousands of initially healthy individuals. We measured several upstream markers of inflammation: interleukin-6, TNF-alpha
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