Editorial Metabolic syndrome: nothing more than a constellation?

This editorial referes to ‘The metabolic syndrome predicts cardiovascular mortality: a 13-year follow-up study in elderly non-diabetic Finns ’ by J. Wang et al., doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehl524 In these last years, the scientific community made a considerable effort to understand the biology underlying cardiovascular disease (CVD), the major cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world. From the very begin-ning it became apparent that several CVD risk factors were present in the same individual, and the concept of clustering risk factors was finally labelled in the 1980s by Reaven as ‘Syndrome X’.1 This author postulated that a set of metabolic and cardiovascular risk factors—such as hyper-tension, hypertriglyceridaemia, low high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol levels, and hyperinsulinaemia—could hav