快猫短视频

Lausanne

THE evidence of a link between a bacterium and heart disease is now
鈥渙verwhelming鈥�, says a leading epidemiologist. His comment follows the news that
German researchers have successfully cultured the bacterium Chlamydia
pneumoniae from the arteries of patients with heart disease.

The possible role of C. pneumoniae in heart disease has been hotly
debated for several years (鈥淐an you catch a heart attack?鈥�, New
快猫短视频, 8 June 1996, p 38). Many researchers claim to have found traces
of DNA from C. pneumoniae in the fatty plaques that can build up in
arteries, blocking the blood supply to the heart. This has led to suggestions
that the bacterium, which has infected about half of all people by the time they
are 20 years old, is a cause of the plaques and therefore a major factor in
heart disease.

But other researchers have been unable to find traces of the organism in
arterial plaques, and have doubted the link between C. pneumoniae and
blocked arteries.

However, at last week鈥檚 Eighth European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and
Infectious Diseases in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists said they had grown the
bacterium, which is notoriously difficult to culture, from tissue taken from the
coronary arteries of heart disease patients.

Matthias Maass of the Medical University of L眉beck in Germany said that
nearly a quarter of the 120 arterial samples he and his colleagues studied
tested positive for C. pneumoniae DNA. And when they went on to try to
culture the bacterium, they grew 鈥渧iable, continuously replicative鈥� C.
pneumoniae from five samples.

Thomas Grayston, an epidemiologist from the University of Washington in
Seattle who has championed the role of C. pneumoniae in heart disease,
says: 鈥淭he evidence would now seem to be overwhelming of an association between
C. pneumoniae and atherosclerosis.鈥�

However, Maass warns that the final proof that the bacterium is involved is
still missing: 鈥淲e may have shown it鈥檚 there, but we haven鈥檛 proved that it
causes the disease.鈥�