Cardiovascular Comorbidities in Patients with Psoriasis: Risk Profile Including Carotide Ultrasonography Assessed in...

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease, and its comorbidities have attracted serious interest in recent years. The evidence that psoriasis is associated with systemic inflammation and significantly higher incidence of cardiovascular risk factors has already been described. The results of published studies are highly variable, the conclusions are ambiguous, and further epidemiological studies are needed for validation of published data. Therefore, we initiated a project aimed at identifying the association with cardiovascular risk factors, including early stages of atherosclerosis, that represent important comorbidities in patients with psoriasis. We carried out a hospital-based case-control study on 189 patients with chronic plaque psoriasis enrolled as cases. The control group consisted of 378 patients with other skin diseases complying with the same exclusion criteria who were recruited to the study as the controls. All participants underwent physical examination, blood tests, and measuring of blood pressure and waist circumference. Furthermore, we evaluated carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) in a subset of 117 cases and controls (matched 1:2) with no history of cardiovascular disease. The results showed higher prevalence of hypertension, hyperlipidemia, waist circumference, weight, body-mass index (BMI), and C-reactive protein (CRP) level in patients with psoriasis than in controls. These parameters have been clearly demonstrated to be risk factors for the development of cardiovascular diseases. The associations between psoriasis and diastolic blood pressure, BMI value, and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol were statistically significant in the binary data logistic model as well. CIMT was not significantly higher in patients compared with controls.