Italian researchers have found a substance in children they believe leads to heart disease.
Researchers from Rome University, working at the Umberto I hospital, detected the substance in children with very high levels of cholesterol.
They think the substance, a protein called CD40L, causes cholesterol to coagulate in veins and eventually cause cardiovascular diseases and heart attacks.
The discovery, published in Tuesday's edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiologists, holds out hope of greatly reducing heart disease, the team led by Francesco Violi and Francesco Martino says.
By keeping CD40L under control, with lifestyle changes and new drugs, cholesterol levels will fall and the killer diseases will be prevented, they say.
"This is a discovery of great social impact," Violi said.
"It will enable doctors to take preventive action with today's kids and cut future heart attacks".
He noted that this would cut one of the heaviest burdens on the national health service.
Martino said: "Heart attacks and strokes are diseases that emerge in adults but they are predicted by paediatric problems. Therefore, we have to identify the children who are most at risk in order to prevent future diseases".
Some 20-30% of children between the ages of 6 and 14 have high levels of cholesterol. But they are rarely spotted, because children are rarely tested for the substance and the problem does not cause symptoms.
If unchecked, it is reckoned that CD40L could eventually cause heart problems in at least 100,000 of today's five million Italian children.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Italy - as it is in all developed countries - and costs the Italian health service some two billion euros a year.
