Microbes implicated in heart disease

Last year, a research team offered some of the first molecular evidence to support the provocative idea that heart disease could stem from infections with bacteria that cause chlamydia. Now, the group suggests that other microbes might cause heart problems in the same way.

In the earlier work, Josef M. Penninger of the University of Toronto and his colleagues discovered that part of a protein made by chlamydia bacteria resembles a piece of a protein in human heart tissue.