Interest in research on atherosclerosis involving children has been the consequence of
confluent evidence that atherogenic process begins in early life and grows silently until the
occurrence of clinical events in middleage or later. We carried out a cross-study in the
Mediterranean area on a random sample of a secondary school of Casteldaccia (a farming
and fishing village located on the Northern coast of Sicily, East of Palermo), consisting of
186 teen-agers (103 males and 83 females) aged between 10 and 13 years (average age�…