Baseline distribution and correlation analysis of hsCRP in an insurance applicant population.

Many clinical studies have shown that baseline levels of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) in apparently healthy men and women are highly predictive of future risk of heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac death, and the development of peripheral arterial disease. This paper presents an analysis of the baseline characteristics of our prospective study cohort. The intent of our prospective study is to determine whether hsCRP can be used to better classify risk for life insurance applicants already at risk for cardiovascular events, as well as those who are not. The possibility that low levels of hsCRP levels in otherwise healthy applicants might be associated with more favorable cardiovascular risk could allow this test to be used to more precisely stratify risk in the standard-or-better underwriting classifications. In this preliminary analysis, high sensitivity CRP appears to be weakly correlated with BMI, and perhaps triglyceride level in this cohort of insurance applicants. Somewhat surprisingly, in contrast to many published reports, hsCRP was not found to be correlated with other lipid measures (TC, HDL, LDL), dysmetabolic markers or smoking classification during the underwriting process. We plan to analyze mortality results as they evolve in the future.