The Big Shift in Cardiology to Atheroma and Inflammation

For the 4 decades that I’ve been a cardiologist, we’ve been obsessed with obstructive, blood flow-limiting narrowings and blockages in the coronary arteries, and using procedures like stenting and bypass surgery to fix them. This year we’ve gotten signals that a major shift is ongoing, from fixation on obstructive coronary artery disease (simply put “blockages”) to the focus on non-obstructive arterial disease (simply put “atheroma”), as visualized non-invasively to be high-risk, so-called vulne...