Katz, Rain; Cvejkus, Ryan; Wang, Jiebiao; Thyagarajan, Bharat; Barinas-Mitchell, Emma; Carr, John Jeffrey; Terry, James G.; Nair, Sangeeta; Tang, Winnie Wan-Yee; Miller, Rachel G.; Miljkovic, Iva; Zmuda, Joseph M.; Kuipers, Allison L. (2026).听.听International Journal of Hypertension, 2026(1), 9724102.听
Identifying proteins in the blood that signal early聽cardiovascular disease (CVD)聽could improve the ability to predict disease risk before symptoms develop. This study examined whether blood protein levels were associated with early markers of聽atherosclerosis聽(the buildup of plaque in the arteries) in 342 Afro-Caribbean men participating in the Tobago Health Study. The researchers measured nearly 100 cardiovascular-related proteins and compared them with three indicators of arterial health:聽pulse wave velocity (PWV), which measures arterial stiffness;聽coronary artery calcification (CAC), a marker of plaque in the heart’s arteries; and聽abdominal aortic calcification (AAC), a marker of plaque in the body’s largest artery. After accounting for established cardiovascular risk factors such as age, blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, and cholesterol levels, they identified 18 proteins associated with arterial stiffness and one associated with coronary artery calcification. Thirteen of these protein associations had not been reported previously. Although many of the identified proteins are involved in biological processes linked to cardiovascular disease, such as inflammation, the strongest associations involved proteins not previously connected to these measures of atherosclerosis. As the first large-scale blood protein study conducted in an Afro-Caribbean population, these findings suggest that protein biomarkers of cardiovascular disease may differ across racial and ethnic groups and could help improve future approaches to risk prediction in populations with a high burden of cardiovascular disease.
FIGURE 1
Plot of protein associations with PWV in fully adjusted models. Markers labeled in blue are significant in final PWV model after Benjamini鈥揌ochberg FDR correction. Dashed red line corresponds to the聽p聽value of 0.05 (鈭抣og10(0.05) 鈮� 1.30).