Editorial Cardiovascular Inflammation

which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (AVD) is the leading cause of death andmorbidity in the western world. Since first proposed in 1999 by Ross, inflammation has been gradually accepted to be one of the key components in development of atherosclerosis and in its acute clinical manifestations such as heart attacks and strokes [1]. This special issue includes a series of papers that cover a diverse spectrumof this topic. It is aimed to provide the readers a concurrent understanding of the fundamental development as well as molecular insights of AVD thus facilitating therapeutic discovery by targeting cardiovascular inflammation. First, the decade-old concept that atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease is reinforced by a clinical observation published in this issue by Su et al. that serum IL