When you go to the dentist, you sometimes have your teeth cleaned. Next time, ask the dentist to give you a piece of the deposits that he removes from your gum line. This is called PLAQUE. It has a close resemblance to the plaque that is found in your heart arteries. If you get a chance to feel it, it reminds people sometime of the desert that is called Crème Brule. The surface is very hard. The term heart disease can be boiled down to two sentences, and they would be.

Heart disease is plaque and plaque is heart disease. The process of plaque growing in the heart arteries is heart disease. Once the plaque building process begins, it never stops, and it continues indefinitely until either a heart attack occurs or other debilitating result happens. The only way to deal with plaque is either by stopping the process dead in its tracks with medical intervention or having a doctor employ other processes to slow down the growth of the plaque. An example would be giving the patent a statin drug.

In the above picture, you can see the plaque buildup in along the walls of the artery in the heart. In this picture there are two specific points where it looks like the plaque is just about touching each other from both sides of the artery. This is the point of maximum interruption of the blood flow. If you find a point in the artery where there is a 70% lessening in the blood flow, the patient will experience pain or angina in the heart area of the body. So this is what you need to remember or to always keep in your mind.

If the process of heart disease has begun in your body, you are not going to have any warnings whatsoever until the blockage gets to about a 70% blockage in your body. Only then will you begin to experience pain. Now in the chart below, you will see the progression of the disease. Each stage has its owns name which is on the left. The growth of plaque over time is also referred to as hardening of the arteries.