Coronary involvement in lupus patients: Getting sharper pictures with advanced vascular imaging?

摘要

As previous imaging studies have primarily used traditional approaches focusing on atherosclerotic burden, it remains unknown whether differences in atherosclerotic plaque morphology, tissue composition, or vulnerable features exist in SLE patients compared with the general population, as well as what may be characteristic of atherosclerosis in SLE patients. This knowledge would help to elucidate pathogenesis of cardiovascular events in SLE patients. In a postmortem study of rheumatoid arthritis, another autoimmune disorder associated with increased cardiovascular risk, Aubry et al. (9) found that patients with rheumatoid arthritis actually had a lesser extent of atherosclerosis but a higher incidence of vulnerable plaques and vessel wall inflammation compared with control subjects. In a recent study using multidetector computed tomography to study noncalcified coronary plaque, Kiani et al. (10) reported that noncalcified plaques were associated with SLE activity measures.