Vaccination Against Atherosclerosis

T-Helper 2 Immunity Is Associated With Reduced Risk of Myocardial Infarction and Stroke

“…3 This has stimulated the development of novel therapies for prevention and treatment of CVD targeting the immune system. 38,39 However, an important limitation in this development has been the poor understanding of the role of the immune system in the development of atherosclerosis and acute cardiovascular events in humans. The present report is the first prospective study of associations between Th1 and Th2 cells with the risk for acute myocardial infarction and stroke.…”

OxLDL immune complexes activate complement and induce cytokine production by MonoMac 6 cells and human macrophages

“…Although there is a general consensus supporting the involvement of immunological mechanisms in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis (2,21,22), there are real differences of opinion about the significance of humoral immunity mechanisms, particularly of the autoimmune response elicited by modified lipoproteins (23)(24)(25)(26). Most of the controversy centers on whether such antibodies have proinflammatory or protective properties and it is a result of data obtained in animal models (27)(28)(29)(30).…”

Lipoprotein Autoantibodies

“…The uncertainty results from two sets of observations: animal experiments that have been interpreted as suggesting a protective role for oxLDL antibodies (13) and conflicting data obtained in clinical and epidemiological studies that tried to correlate levels of oxLDL antibodies in serum with different end points of arteriosclerosis. These discrepancies are likely to result from multiple factors, including individual variations in the immune response, affecting concentration, isotype, and avidity of the autoantibodies, and inaccuracy of the assays, highly influenced by differences in antibody avidity and by the presence of soluble IC.…”