Cardiovascular Diseases and Rheumatology

The prevalence of various cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in the different rheumatologic disorders is a very important topic. Each disease has a number of unique manifestations despite the fact that an overlap is present due to shared common risk factors, which may be related to the longer life expectancy of the recent therapeutic advances. A growing understanding of the role of inflammation and immune system in the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis as well as the early detection of cardiovascular manifestations is due to the availability and use of sophisticated noninvasive cardiac and vascular diagnostic technology. Such discipline results in the detection of cardiac manifestation unique to each rheumatologic disorder. This was not possible previously due to short life expectancy, limited therapeutic interventions, vague understanding of pathological process for each disease, and the limited diagnostic resources.