Plasma fluorescent oxidation products: independent predictors of coronary heart disease in men

Fluorescent oxidation products in plasma are stable with routine blood collection methods and reflect oxidation in food, animals, and in vitro. Whether plasma fluorescent oxidation products predict future coronary heart disease has not been established. Among US men without cardiovascular disease who provided blood specimens in 1994 in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the authors confirmed 266 incident nonfatal myocardial infarction or fatal coronary heart disease endpoints during 6 years of follow-up. Using a nested case-control design, they measured baseline levels of fluorescent oxidation products. Each case was matched with two controls according to age, smoking status, and time of blood draw. The relative risk of coronary heart disease between extreme quintiles was 1.83 (95% confidence interval: 1.07, 3.13; p for trend = 0.005) in the multivariate analysis controlling for other cardiovascular risk factors and traditional lipid markers. Further adjustment for C-reactive protein and glycated hemoglobin A(1c) did not materially attenuate this association. The multivariate-adjusted relative risk between extreme quintiles was 3.36 (95% confidence interval: 1.33, 8.48; p for trend = 0.005) when the analysis was restricted to men who had fasted for more than 10 hours before blood draw. The authors found that plasma fluorescent oxidation products significantly and independently predicted coronary heart disease incidence among men without previous cardiovascular events.