Abstract 355: Early Vascular Aging In Young People And Their Connective Tissue Status

Abstract

Aim is to compare the phenotypes of vascular aging (VA) in young people with manifestations of hereditary connective tissue disorders (HCTD), which are increasingly common in modern youth. Material and Methods: 264 students (93 boys and 171 girls) were examined at the age of 18 to 25 years on the basis of University Health Center within framework of the National Preventive Project “University - Territory of Health”. Angiological screening was performed using VaSera VS-1500 device (Fukuda Denshi, Japan), which allows us to evaluate such an indicator of arterial stiffness as the cardio-ankle vascular index (CAVI). All young people were divided into CAVI-tercile groups, which made it possible to identify carriers of early (upper CAVI-tercile), normal (middle CAVI-tercile) and healthy (first CAVI-tercile) VA phenotypes. Early vascular aging is also called EVA syndrome. The most specific manifestations of HCTD were evaluated taking into account the Ghent Criteria of 2-nd revision, which allow us to obtain score assessment of CT involvement. Data processing was carried out using software package “Statistica 10.0” (StatSoft Inc, USA). Results: It turned out that an assessment of HCTD severity equal to 5 or more points in three groups was found in 41.5%, 18.4% and 9.4% (P=0.002) in boys and 49.3%, 21.6% and 12.8% (P=0.000) in girls. The most common HCTD signs include wrist and thumb symptoms, myopia, flat feet, atypical striae, dolichocephaly, enophthalmos, etc. Conclusion: The most stigmatized young people were among carriers of EVA syndrome, and the least ones - among those with signs of health VA. This means that in young carriers of rigid vessels, according to results of angiological screening, it is necessary to carry out a timely differential diagnosis between true EVA syndrome and HCTD using of phenotypic analysis. The nature of vascular stiffness increase in these two cases is absolutely different – in first case, it is early arteriosclerosis, and in case of HCTD, it is a genetically determined imbalance of elastin and collagen, which requires the use of completely different corrective measures. This explains importance of timely differential diagnosis when identifying young people with high vascular wall stiffness