Chronic inflammation can cause all sorts of mischief in the body. Now a study has found that people with rheumatoid arthritis - a chronic inflammatory disease - are at greater risk of carotid artery plaques. This makes perfect sense, since inflammation is a recognized cause of atherosclerosis (the clogging and narrowing of blood vessels).

Carotid artery thickness and plaques, of course, are linked to the risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

The recent study used ultrasound to determine the thickness of the carotid arteries, a measure of the presence of atherosclerotic plaques, in 98 patients with rheumatoid arthritis whose average age at the time of diagnosis was 35. The investigators found that those patients with rheumatoid arthritis were three times more likely to have carotid artery plaques than were the 98 control subjects.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a fairly common disorder estimated to affect about 1 percent of Caucasians at some time during their life. (The disease affects all racial groups but its prevalence among African-Americans, for example, is significantly lower.) Two to three times more women suffer from the disease than men do, and it may affect as many as 5 percent of women over the age of 65. Other studies have shown that rheumatoid arthritis is associated with an increased likelihood of coronary artery disease and heart failure.

These findings underscore the fact that patients with rheumatoid arthritis must receive aggressive management of all their risk factors for arteriosclerosis, such as elevated cholesterol and blood pressure, as well as cigarette smoking.