The role of adaptive T cell immunity in atherosclerosis.

There is now solid evidence that T cell adaptive immunity is involved in atherogenesis. While initial studies have focused on the pathogenic arm of the immune response, more recent work clearly suggests an important role for several subsets of regulatory T cells in the protection against lesion development. Here, we review the current knowledge on the role of both pathogenic and regulatory adaptive T cell immunity in atherosclerosis, generated mainly from the study of mouse models of the disease.