Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases are a real public health problem and have multifactorial origin. Full comprehension of these diseases is very difficult because of their clinical and biological heterogeneity. The best way to understand the development of these diseases is to first investigate each biological system involved in the diseases and secondly, interactions between them. Studying intermediate phenotype variation for these biological systems is a new and promising approach for their elucidation. Among these metabolic systems, inflammation is known to be implicated in the occurrence and worsening of cardiovascular diseases. For this review, we chose to report the most important results concerning environmental, genetic and epigenetic determinants that influence intermediate phenotypes (protein and RNA levels) of inflammation. Indeed, numerous studies have investigated these determinants in healthy populations, in other words, without the influence of either disease or medication. This new approach will help to better understand the regulation of these intermediate phenotypes and to identify a panel of risk markers, which may be useful in predicting and warning those at risk and in giving adequate treatment to each patient.