TUESDAY, Aug. 11 (HealthDay News) -- In older adults, aortic sclerosis is associated with platelet nitric oxide resistance but not with conventional coronary risk factors, which may explain why patients with aortic sclerosis have an increased risk of developing blood clots, according to a study in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging.
Doan T.M. Ngo, Ph.D., of the University of Adelaide in Australia, and colleagues studied 253 randomly selected subjects, ages 51 to 77 years, who underwent transthoracic echocardiography.
The researchers identified aortic sclerosis in 19.4 percent of the subjects. Their analysis found that aortic sclerosis was strongly associated with impaired platelet nitric oxide responsiveness, increased age, and low body mass index. It also found that conventional coronary risk factors such as elevated low-density lipoprotein levels and hypertension were not predictive of aortic sclerosis.
"Over the next several decades, as the population of the U.S. and the world ages, calcific aortic valve disease will become increasingly prevalent and clinically manifest," states the author of an accompanying editorial. "Although we now know that calcific aortic valve disease is a biologically active process with many similarities to atherosclerosis, the atherosclerosis paradigm has failed to identify effective medical therapies to slow or prevent calcific aortic valve disease progression. If such therapies are to be developed, it is time for a new paradigm to stimulate new thinking and new insights into the varied and overlapping mechanisms that regulate lesion formation, myofibroblastic transformation, and calcification progression."
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