OSMR and atherosclerosis: Besides, the chronic inflammatory state during atherosclerosis development drives vascular SMC differentiation, which reduces the expression of SMC specific markers[31] and may therefore also reduce expression of LIFR and OSMR. This contention is in line with our observation that OSM is negatively correlated with SMC markers and with Kakutani et al., who showed that OSM induces SMC differentiation[4].