As well as the relevance of our findings to the study of the inflammatory response to surgery, atherosclerosis, cancer and other chronic diseases, these findings would explain the rather puzzling observation that obesity, increased waist:hip ratio and CRP are related to risk of death from external causes and the higher rates of morbidity in the obese from trauma, surgery and acute pancreatitis[16,17]. This evidence concerns the gene CRP and atherosclerosis.