Editorial Arterial stiffness: intermediate or surrogate endpoint for cardiovascular events?

This editorial refers to ‘Carotid stiffness and the risk of new vascular events in patients with manifest cardiovascular disease. The SMART study ’ by J.M. Dijk et al., doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehi254 Identification of cardiovascular (CV) risk is mandatory to determine the intensity of interventions. Despite the recognized advantages of classical algorithms for global risk assessment, important limitations have been noticed, and current research is focusing on subclinical markers of arterial disease accessible to non-invasive investigation, including arterial stiffness, carotid intima-media thickness, and endothelial dysfunction. The current growing interest in arterial stiffness orig-inates from the repeated demonstration of its predictive value for CV events, including CV mortality, myocardia