Paul M. Ridker (born 1959) is a cardiovascular epidemiologist and biomedical researcher. He is currently the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention. Ridker also holds an appointment as Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Ridker's research has provided proof-of-principle for the inflammation hypothesis of atherosclerosis, the first FDA approved diagnostic test for vascular inflammation, and the first proven anti-inflammatory treatment for coronary artery disease. He is among the most cited researchers in cardiovascular medicine in the world and has an H-index above 220.
Early life
Ridker was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1959. He attended Brown University for his undergraduate studies, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1981. He attended Harvard Medical School, where he received his MD in 1986; Ridker completed his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and West Roxbury VA Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1992, Ridker earned a Master of Public Health degree at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Career
Ridker’s translational research combines the tools of epidemiology, vascular biology, and randomized clinical trials to determine the root causes of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. He is responsible for the clinical development of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), a marker of inflammation, that is used to evaluate the risk of heart attack and stroke, and coined the term “residual inflammatory risk” to describe patients who are at risk due to vascular inflammation rather than high cholesterol levels. Early in his career, Ridker recognized that elevated cholesterol levels were absent in almost half of all heart attack victims and that the pro-inflammatory response detected by hsCRP and the central signaling cytokine Interleukin 6 were responsible for a large proportion of “unexplained risk”.
Ridker is best known for his work developing inflammatory biomarkers and his clinical trials defining anti-inflammatory treatments for cardiovascular disease. In 1997, Ridker showed that elevated levels of hsCRP and interleukin-6 in healthy individuals were a major risk marker for future heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and cardiovascular death, independent of traditional risk factors. Between 1998 and 2005, Ridker showed that individuals with elevated hsCRP but low levels of cholesterol were at substantial risk and that statin drugs used to lower cholesterol also lowered hsCRP and thus had important anti-inflammatory properties. This work, largely funded by the National Institutes of Health, eventually led to the design and conduct of the multi-national JUPITER primary prevention trial which in 2008 demonstrated that individuals with elevated hsCRP levels could reduce by half their risk of future heart attack or stroke by taking statin therapy, even if cholesterol levels were already low.