IL6 and atherosclerosis: In the SMART study, a study aimed to investigate the benefit of a CD4 guided approach on treatment (El-Sadr et al., 2006), markers of inflammation and coagulation such as IL-6, D-dimer and sCD14 were shown to be excellent predictors of atherosclerosis and mortality (Kuller et al., 2008; Sandler et al., 2011; Kelesidis et al., 2012).