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Inflammation may be important for accelerated progression of atherosclerosis in patients with hypertension or diabetes, but few studies included subjects with early stages of atherosclerosis such as those with asymptomatic carotid lesions.

We studied 100 patients with newly diagnosed hypertension and another 100 patients with newly diagnosed type II diabetes to evaluate in such groups the association of two markers of inflammation, fibrinogen and C-reactive protein (CRP), with carotid atherosclerosis, beyond traditional cardiovascular risk factors (e.g., older age, male gender, obesity, smoking, family history of CAD, dyslipidemia).

We found positive correlation between the extent of carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and levels of CRP (p <0.0001 in both groups) and fibrinogen (p <0.0001 in diabetics only). By multivariate analysis we searched, among all evaluated …