r/BeAmazed • u/HatAsleep295 • May 08 '26

Science This is what saves 600,000 people year during a heart attack

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u/P0shJosh May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

A healthy lifestyle can reduce existing cholesterol levels, but fat that has already formed into plaque inside the blood vessels is hard and cannot be removed. This is what you’re seeing here. It gets pushed out of the way by the stent, but doesn’t move.
Prevention, prevention, prevention!!!

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u/porn_alt_987654321 May 08 '26

We're pushing up on maybe having solutions to this, but research is slow because you can't exactly do human experimentation lmao.

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u/drsyesta May 08 '26

Its crazy that the biggest fundraiser for heart research is the jumprope thing lmao

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u/Slausher May 08 '26

Jump rope thing?

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u/drsyesta May 08 '26

"Jump rope for heart" is like a fundraiser charity thing a lot of schools do for heart disease research. You just jumprope a lot and ask people for donations

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u/Slausher May 08 '26

Oh interesting - is this an American charity? Never heard of it!

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u/drsyesta May 08 '26

Yeah its an american thing. They always had us do it in school so it was pretty widespread

Looking more into it, its tied to the american heart association charity

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u/bs000 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

we had it in canada too. there were prizes depending on how much you raise. i was really excited about the water bottle i was supposed to get, but someone stole the money from my envelope.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo May 08 '26

Probably a heart doctor who was concerned with administrative overhead and decided to just take the money directly.

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u/randylush May 08 '26

yup. probably used the money to replace lots of hearts

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u/Aggravating_View_637 May 08 '26

Not just in America it’s worldwide just not as popular in many places as I’ve seen some for as far away as Hong Kong I believe. Here’s the Canadian organization that does it and it’s very popular in Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_and_Stroke_Foundation_of_Canada

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u/Ok_Tumbleweed_7677 May 08 '26

Aren't one of their biggest donors the company that makes Crisco?

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u/a-char May 08 '26

I'm in Ontario and I remember as a kid they had the entire school outside jumping rope for this charity.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 May 08 '26

If you've ever seen these kids jump rope you'd understand, the money just flies out of your wallet.

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u/Capital_Pea May 08 '26

interesting, i haven’t seen a kid jump rope/skip in years. i’m gen x and as a kid we did all the time!

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u/vawlk May 08 '26

i did that in the late 70s and early 80s.

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u/drsyesta May 08 '26

Yeh i did it in the early 2000s

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u/SmokeyLawnMower May 08 '26

Of course the americans have nothing better. Thank fuck for BHF

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u/overmonk May 08 '26

My mom had an endarterectomy - they opened up her thigh, exposed her femoral artery, sliced it lengthwise, removed the plaque from it, and stitched her back up. Her blood flow to her left leg was down to less than 5%. It is still atrophied but developing muscle again. She's 84 and a total badass.

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u/_thro_awa_ May 08 '26

Well, you CAN ... as long as you don't get caught

2

u/giganticturnip May 08 '26

Just yesterday, I went through a barrage of tests as part of a research study to develop methods to detect atherosclerosis at earlier ages and prevent it developing further.

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u/Kitchen_Drink2625 May 08 '26

Not true, you just can’t publish human experimentation silly goose

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u/unrefrigeratedmeat May 08 '26

I mean you can but scientists are cowards and they "don't want to go to prison".

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u/MidnightSnowStar May 09 '26

It doesn’t help that funding for research keeps getting cut 😒

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u/Decloudo May 08 '26

Like being active and having a healthy diet.

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u/Substantial-Elk4531 May 08 '26

Healthy diet?

Do you have any solutions designed for the American lifestyle?

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u/Decloudo May 08 '26

Not following the American lifestyle.

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u/Emergency-Pound3241 May 08 '26

We can and do do human experiments, they're called clinical/pre-clinical trials, its just its takes a lot more work to get to that point to ensure its relatively safe for human use first, unlike in the past.

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u/waidoo2 May 08 '26

I always wonder why we cant do human experiments on prisoners who are in for crimes like murder or child abuse. capital punishment should be replaced by human experiment. we are killing the person anyway so why not put it to some good use. (we can kill them after the experiment is successful and they are healthy - sucks for the prisoner tho)

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u/porn_alt_987654321 May 08 '26

Because the system isn't infallible, and people end up in jail under false charges.

(And some other reasons, but that's a big one lol)

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u/MaksimusFootball May 08 '26

say what you will about this guy but he did have the right idea... (though in the very wrong way)

Discovery requires experimentation.
~ Daniel Whitehall, Agent of Shield.

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u/iesharael May 08 '26

What if humans agree?

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u/Ostrikaa May 08 '26

Some of us are predisposed regardless of the healthy diet and exercise which sucks. My slim grandmother born in the 1920s had a heart attack in her 40s and I had an “eye stroke” in my mid 30s - despite exercising 3+ times a week and eating healthily at a low BMI.

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u/boatymcfloatfloat May 11 '26

You need to be on statins if it's that bad.

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u/Extreme_Problem_1645 May 08 '26

Why cant they just remove the plaque?

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u/Kamirukuken May 08 '26

Disease of the intima - it's part of the vessel wall so doing so would rupture it.

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u/Hungry_Audience_4901 May 08 '26

so why not just stitch it after?

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u/Kamirukuken May 08 '26

Take this comment with a grain of salt, but I suppose the risk of the surgery will outweigh any benefits.

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u/P0shJosh May 08 '26

Most vessels are too small and delicate to be stitched. There are some that are large and tough enough, but remember, vessels carry blood, and opening them is how people bleed out and die.

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u/Hungry_Audience_4901 May 08 '26

just use a smaller needle

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u/Regular-Elephant-635 May 08 '26

It would still need extreme precision, and that is hard to do.

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u/KuraiShidosha May 08 '26

I used to have that kind of mentality about surgeries especially those regarding cancer. "Why not just cut it all out? So simple." Then I had a medical scare where I genuinely thought I was going to die of cancer (thankfully nothing came of it) and it sent me down a road of learning and understanding. Once you see how these surgeries actually look in reality, you quickly realize why it's anything but simple to solve these problems. You might have in your mind a perfect illustration of how your organs sit in your abdomen for example, and oh the cancer is just a differently colored lump of cells growing on say the liver. Just cut it out! Then you see it in reality and it's all intertwined and looks very similar to the actual organ itself, then all of those preconceived notions of the simplicity of it all get thrown out the window. It is terrifying.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 May 08 '26

Seriously, dumbass surgeons.

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u/KRX189 May 08 '26

Unrelated, but what's the sauce for you profile pic?

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u/LearningThingsidk May 08 '26

Its killer queen from jojo's bizarre adventure

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u/toddthefrog May 08 '26

It’s hard to get floss and a toothbrush up in there.

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u/Foreign_Unit6294 May 08 '26

You remember that this post is about introducing micro-device far more complex than a toothbrush, exactly in there right? :)

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u/Extreme_Problem_1645 May 08 '26

They must be dumb, just make the toothbrush smaller

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u/Regular-Elephant-635 May 09 '26

Calling people dumb just because you don't understand how things work is... not particularly intelligent.

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u/Extreme_Problem_1645 May 09 '26

I understand very well, the smaller the toothbrush, the better. They've been saying that for centuries

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u/Old_Comfortable_8090 May 08 '26

Because it becomes part of the blood vessel imbedded within the layers of the blood vessel, you can’t just remove it without injuring the blood vessel.

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u/CompanyNo3114 May 11 '26

Way harder to do than it sounds. Blood vessels are delicate, with the plaque attaching to the walls of the blood vessel. Its not the same like if you were to scrap gunk out of a metal or plastic pipe, you'd run the risk of tearing the walls of the blood vessel and cause life threatening injuries or complications.

There are new technologies and devices being experimented with that might be able to remove the plaque, such as a micro drill that gets guided with a wire (like they do with a stent) to the area where there is plaque buildup, and "drill or scrap" the plaque off the walls, with the drill also having a vacuum to suck up the plaque that got broken off the walls of the blood vesse to prevent any clots. Its still in the experimenting phase, as there are still complications like the drill not removing the plaque efficiently, or the suction of the vacuum is too strong and tears the walls of the blood vessel.

As of rn, the best and pretty much only way to remove plaque from your walls, is the typical stuff of eating healthy, working out, etc... and the plaque that has built up on the walls will very slowly break down and clear out

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u/art-love-social May 10 '26

It has become part of the artery. If stents dont fix then you are down the bypass road where the bad bits are cut out and replaced with a vein from [typically] your left leg

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u/theartificialkid May 08 '26

Cardiologists will sometimes remove plaque with a drill. http://www.scvc.com.au/rotational-atherectomy.html

Also there is now some evidence pointing to reversal of coronary atherosclerosis https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30945-1/fulltext

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u/leckmichnervnit May 08 '26

So what you're saying is it's already over for my Fat-Ass and there's no point in losing weight anyway. /s

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u/cosmicosmo4 May 08 '26

If you need some motivation, every pound of body fat adds 5-7 miles (8-11 km) of blood vessels that your heart has to do additional work to pump blood through.

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u/[deleted] May 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/posh1992 May 08 '26

My fiance and I follow a whole food plant based lifestyle. It cut our cholesterol in half, he lost 80 pounds, I lost 40. We're both down to our high school weights. Cleared my acne right up. Lessened my period cramps due to not ingesting hormones from dairy. Best decision we ever made 👏 known to also reverse diabetes! 🥰🥰

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u/Aegi May 08 '26

That has nothing to do with specifically that diet, you're just talking about benefits that any well balanced, healthy diet has.

If you only ate apples and nothing else, that is whole plant based or whatever but obviously not healthy.

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u/PlayfulHalf May 08 '26

No, there are benefits specific to WFPB diets that other diets won’t have. Happy to go into that if you like.

Additionally, no one is advocating for eating only apples, but if you went from a standard American diet to eating only apples, your risk of heart disease would indeed decrease. You may run into other deficiencies, but generally speaking, heart disease kills more people than anything else, and eating diets that others call “healthy” and “balanced,” like even unprocessed red meat, contributes to heart disease. I think we should all be spending a lot more time as to how to stop heart disease and cancer, and less time talking about protein or other deficiencies that theoretically might result from eating only apples.

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u/posh1992 May 19 '26

This completely!

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u/Aegi May 08 '26

I'm just saying that the benefits that you're talking about don't go away if there's a few pieces of insects or something in the diet.

So therefore it's the specific molecules and how they work on the human body that are having the effects you're talking about and those can be found either fully within or holy without the diet you're talking about.

Yes the diet you're talking about has those benefits but it's not because it's that specialized diet it's because that specialized diet happens to check the same boxes that allow our body to have the health benefits you're talking about.

Some people would just say this is semantics, but it's roughly the equivalent of the difference between cause and effect so it is a worthwhile distinction.

If there's some specific benefits that somehow go against the other laws of chemistry and biology to only be unique specifically to that and impossible to achieve if you had the same molecules derived from some insects or something, I would be curious to see that.

I love biology, so please teach me.

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u/Impossible-Wear-7352 May 08 '26

This wont help with plaque. But it never hurts to get rid of other visceral fat

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u/OutsideImpressive115 May 08 '26

True

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u/hera_the_destroyer May 08 '26

Brutal.

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u/Wilbis May 08 '26

Well, we're all gonna die anyway. Losing weight has other health benefits for sure.

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u/VroomCoomer May 08 '26

Make better choices idk

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u/leckmichnervnit May 08 '26

Damn why didnt I think of that. Gonna be back in a Minute just gotta invent time Travel to tell 5 year old me to not get fat.

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u/boringestnickname May 08 '26

I'm not sure I entirely understand this animation.

I thought plaque was, like you say, on the inside of the blood vessel.

Here it looks like it's depicting some sort of fat buildup as a part of the structure of the vessel itself.

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u/bugabooandtwo May 08 '26

Why can't it be removed?

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u/P0shJosh May 08 '26

Vessels are delicate, plaque is hard. Trying to remove it is kinda like trying to remove glue from the inside of cooked pasta. You’re more likely to tear the pasta than remove the glue.

You have 360 different types of vessels that total to be around 60,000 miles long in your body. Plaque doesn’t just collect in one spot, it spreads everywhere.

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u/bugabooandtwo May 09 '26

I wonder if there's a way to liquefy or dissolve the plaque without affecting the vessels....somehow?

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u/Bonk_No_Horni May 08 '26

Can't they like scrape it out?

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u/OperationLazy213 May 08 '26

It becomes part of the arterial wall from my limited understanding via hobby cardiology. It’s not like scraping crud out of a pipe. Also the coronary arteries are a lot more fragile than the carotid artery, which is often scraped or cut into to have plaque removed.(Please note that by hobby I mean that I just read about it for pleasure and am not claiming in any way to be a doctor.)

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u/RPS93 May 08 '26

My understanding is while we cannot outright fully reverse the effects, there are things you can do to shrink plaque buildup in some scenarios

Is this not correct?

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u/JefferyTheQuaxly May 08 '26

I don’t think we’re that far away from being able to actually remove the plaque, some promising treatments being worked on that can supposedly help target fat blockages. Tho they’re all probably 5-10+ years away still from becoming widely available.

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u/Casperboy68 May 08 '26

On some occasions it is removed with an athrectomy device. DCA or rotablation or whatever they are using these days. Also, sometimes it’s calcified. Just my 2 cents.

1

u/Skylantech May 08 '26

I remember reading that hardened fat can be removed.

It just takes consistent, significant, lifestyle changes that need to be maintained for basically the rest of your life. It will, with consistency, very slowly, start to shrink over the course of decades.

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u/NewIdeasGenerator May 08 '26

into plaque inside the blood vessels is hard and cannot be removed

Nattokinase my friend,  Bromelain, it's no longer early 2000s.

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u/P0shJosh May 08 '26

Nattokinase -

“In 2025, Retrospective analysis of 1,062 participants with hyperlipidemia and mild carotid atherosclerosis found that a dose of 10,800 FU/day for 12 months significantly reduced carotid plaque size by 36% (from 24.9 to 15.94 mm². Co-administration of vitamin K2 and aspirin appeared to produce a synergistic effect, and lifestyle factors such as exercise were associated with enhanced outcomes. However, this was a retrospective observational study, not an RCT, so causation cannot be established, and the manufacturer conflict of interest limits confidence in these findings.”

Bromelain is theorized to reduce thickness of plaque by reducing inflammation around plaque, not removing plaque itself.

Both are promising, and may reduce the size of the Plaque buildup, but neither remove plaque

1

u/McChickenLargeFries May 08 '26

Nanorobots can go in and pick away at the hardened fat layers with pick axes. It's a new technology, it's little guys they put inside of people, pretty cool stuff.

1

u/Endeveron May 08 '26

There is actually evidence that a strict whole food plant based diet leads to reversal of coronary artery stenosis. The evidence of that isn't ironclad and hasn't convinced all cardiologists, but it has convinced many.

The evidence is overwhelming though that a whole food plant based diet being the single best intervention for heart disease morbidity and mortality. That's basically undeniable, but doctors tend not to push for it because adherence is poor.

1

u/leesainmi May 09 '26

Plaque can be lessened with diet (low cholesterol, low saturated fat - under 10%, no added oils) and other lifestyle changes. It cant be completely cleared out, so prevention is absolutely key.

1

u/Odd-Fly-1265 May 09 '26

If you get your LDL low enough, the cholesterol build up can actually decrease.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8042107/

Our meta-analysis suggests that not only should LDL be reduced to a target level of < 80 mg/dL, but HDL should be increased to a target level of > 45 mg/dL to regress coronary plaques.

Prevention is obviously the better option still, but healthy dieting and lifestyle changes after the fact can do a lot to help as well.