Atherosclerosis-an age-dependent autoimmune disease

Abstract

With increasing age, various diseases that mostly have their roots earlier in life become clinically manifest and are, therefore, age-dependent diseases. Table 1 lists the most frequent medically as well as the most important diseases from a socioeconomical perspective. However, several age-related diseases often develop in a single patient and this multimorbidity is the major problem in geriatrics that becomes ever more important with increasing life expectancy. Worldwide, cardiovascular diseases and infections are the main causes of death followed by tumours [1]. Interestingly, in the developed world, the costs imposed upon society by treatment of age-related diseases shows a different distribution, i.e., cardiovascular diseases followed by autoimmune diseases and tumours with infections at lower ranks. Among cardiovascular diseases, atherosclerosis is the most important representative leading to the known severe sequelae, i.e., myocardial infarction, stroke and peripheral arterial occlusion. In recent years, increasing experimental and clinical evidence has emerged supporting the concept that inflammatory-immunological processes play a major role in the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis including the hypothesis of a triggering of atherogenesis by microbial-human antigenic crossreactivity as well as bona fide autoimmunity.