Editorial: Metabolic syndrome: sign of things to come ||FREE PAPER||

Reza Tabrizchi

Division of Basic Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, NL, Canada

In a recent article in Vascular Health and Risk Management, Paoletti and colleagues (2006) pointed out that individuals with metabolic syndrome (MS) have twice the risk of dying and three times higher risk of having heart attacks or stroke compared with individuals without this syndrome. Moreover, people with MS have a five-fold greater risk of developing type-2 diabetes. Thus MS could become a leading cause of morbidity/mortality in the world population (Paoletti et al 2006). In the current issue of Vascular Health and Risk Management, Mathieu and colleagues (2006) have proposed a link between MS and atherosclerosis suggesting that individual with the syndrome have a substantially higher risk of coronary heart disease (CHD).