Abstract 75: High Sensitivity C Reactive Protein in Adolescent and Young Adult Patients with Kawasaki Disease Late After Onset

Abstract

Background: In children with history of Kawasaki disease (KD), low grade inflammation was ever reported to be associated with persistent coronary artery lesions (CAL). However, this issue had rarely been checked in adolescents and young adults (10-25 years old). Methods and Results: The study cohort was comprised of 104 subjects: 22 KD patients with angiography-confirmed CAL, which persisted at an average of 12.5 years after onset of KD, 38 KD patients with regressed aneurysms, 44 KD patients without any coronary complications from the disease onset and 31 age-matched (18.7 ± 1.88 years old) healthy controls. Plasma levels of high-sensitivity C reactive protein (hs-CRP) were measured for all participants with a commercially available high-sensitivity method (Immulite, Simens, USA). Plasma levels of hs-CRP were significantly higher in KD patients, regardless of the severity of coronary artery involvement, than controls. However, there was no difference of hs-CRP level between each KD patient groups including any severity of coronary artery lesions. After adjustment for confounding factors such as body mass index, gender and levels of HDL-c, linear regression analysis showed the only independent predictor of logarithmically transformed hs-CRP levels was BMI (β=0.32, p=0.007), rather than patient grouping (p=0.126). Conclusion: Levels of hs-CRP are significantly higher in adolescent and young adult KD patients than age-matched controls. However, we failed to detect significant difference among patients with different severities of CAL. The results implied, in Taiwan, low grade inflammation might play a minor role on the persistence of coronary lesions in KD.