Unmet Needs in the Pathogenesis and Treatment of Cardiovascular Comorbidities in Chronic Inflammatory Diseases

The developments that have taken place in recent decades in the diagnosis and therapy of a number of diseases have led to improvements in prognosis and life expectancy. As a consequence, there has been an increase in the number of patients affected by chronic diseases and who can face new pathologies during their lifetime. The prevalence of chronic heart failure, for example, is approximately 1–2% of the adult population in developed countries, rising to ≥10% among people >70 years of age; in 2015, more than 85 million people in Europe were living with some sort of cardiovascular disease (CVD) (Lubrano and Balzan World J Exp Med 5:21–32, 5; Takahashi et al. Circ J 72:867–72, 8; Kaptoge et al. Lancet 375:132–40, 9). Chronic disease can become, in turn, a major risk factor for other diseases. Furthermore, several new drugs have entered clinical practice whose adverse effects on multiple organs are still to be evaluated. All this necessarily involves a multidisciplinary vision of medicine, where the physician must view the patient as a whole and where collaboration between the various specialists plays a key role. An example of what has been said so far is the relationship between CVD and chronic inflammatory diseases (CIDs). Patients with chronic CVD may develop a CID within their lifetime, and, vice versa, a CID can be a risk factor for the development of CVD. Moreover, drugs used for the treatment of CIDs may have side effects involving the cardiovascular system and thus may be contraindicated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the close relationship between these two groups of diseases and to provide recommendations on the diagnostic approach and treatments in light of the most recent scientific data available.