Higher Pentraxin-3 Level in Patients with Metabolic Syndrome
metabolic risk factors and to predict adverse outcomes in individuals with cardiovascular disease [5] . Some comments may be of interest. Although the authors have shown that patients with MS had significantly higher PTX-3 levels compared to those without MS, some other factors affecting this marker such as untreated or uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes, any abnormality in thyroid function tests and malignancy were not mentioned in this study. In addition, the authors could have added an MS subgroup analysis based on leukocytes, neutrophils, lymphocytes and liver function test that might have affected the results of the study. Equally, an increase in PTX-3 level in a patient may be related to alcohol usage. Therefore, it would have been better if the authors had given information about alcohol usage. Finally, PTX-3 alone without other inflammatory markers may not give information to clinicians about the endothelial inflammatory condition of the patient. We, therefore, think that it should be evaluated together with other serum inflammatory markers such as CRP in the daily clinical practice. It was with great interest that we read the article, ‘Serum pentraxin-3 levels are associated with the severity of metabolic syndrome’, by Karakas et al. [1] . They aimed to investigate the relationship between the level of pentraxin-3 (PTX-3) and the severity of metabolic syndrome (MS) as a novel, simple and reliable indicator of inflammation. They showed that patients with MS had significantly higher PTX-3 high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) levels compared to those without MS. Furthermore, PTX-3 increased as the severity of MS increased. A strong positive correlation was revealed between the severity of MS and PTX-3 and between the severity of MS and hs-CRP. In addition, the correlation analysis revealed a positive correlation between hs-CRP and PTX-3 in the patient population. The study was successfully planned and reported. We believe that these findings will enlighten further studies concerning the association between the severity of MS and PTX-3. We thank the authors for their contribution. MS complex is one of the most important problems in the world [2] . It consists of components including glucose intolerance, abnormal lipid profile, hypertension and abdominal obesity. MS has been shown to be related to atherosclerosis [3] and cardiovascular disease [4] . PTX-3 is a recent candidate immunoinflammatory marker that has been reported to be associated with cardioPublished online: July 26, 2013