Why the study?
How do carotid intima-media thickness and stiffness index β change with age and height in healthy children?
How do carotid intima-media thickness and stiffness index β change with age and height in healthy children?
In healthy children aged 3-16 years, carotid stiffness index β increases with age, while cIMT is positively related to height only in boys, providing normative data for subclinical atherosclerosis markers.
Supports pediatric arterial stiffness norms; leaves open utility as early atherosclerosis marker pending outcome data.
AIMS: The need for early markers of atherosclerosis in paediatric ages has been emphasized recently. Few data are available on the behaviour of carotid intima-media thickness (cIMT) and arterial stiffness in normal children. METHODS: We studied prospectively 131 healthy children (78 boys), aged 3-16 years, by high-definition ultrasonography and echo-tracking technique in order to evaluate cIMT and stiffness index β. RESULTS: Stiffness index β underwent a significant age-related increase (P < 0.001), and a positive relationship between cIMT and height was found in boys. In addition, stiffness index β and cIMT were not related to each other (P = 0.97). CONCLUSION: This study provides information about two markers of subclinical atherosclerosis, cIMT and carotid stiffness index β, in normal children aged 3-16 years. We found a significant age-related and height-related increase of stiffness index β in both sexes, whereas cIMT was positively related to height only in boys.
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Calabrò et al. (2015) studied this question.
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