Heart Disease Vaccine Tested - Unclogs The Arteries

Main Category: Heart Disease
Also Included In: Cholesterol;  Immune System / Vaccines
Article Date: 22 Dec 2004 - 14:00 PST

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A new vaccine that scientists believe may prevent heart disease is currently undergoing rigorous tests.

The jab is thought to reverse damage to clogged arteries and works by using oxidised cholesterol to prime the immune system to recognise types of cholesterol in the blood as foreign, so that it attacks and destroys them.

Two Swedish teams have obtained encouraging results from experiments with mice and hope to start human patient trials within two years.

Mice given the cholesterol jab showed as much as a 70 per cent reduction in the number of plaques, the fatty deposits that build up on the walls of arteries and existing plaques appeared to stop growing, the researchers claimed.

Writing in New Scientist magazine, the scientists, led by Goran Hansson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Jan Nilsson from Lund University, said that the vaccine could significantly reduce the build up of harmful deposits.

The findings were presented at a meeting of the European Vascular Genomics Network in Cambridge last week. However, some experts have questioned whether the jab would work on humans.

Coronary heart disease is the world's leading cause of death, claiming more than seven million lives each year worldwide.

For more information visit: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6825
http://www.hda-online.org.uk/html/about/phnews.asp?ItemID=7386750

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