 Can you name a muscle of your body that starts to work really hard even before you were born? It's the heart muscles. It started pumping blood inside your body even when you were in your mom's womb. Yes and even now think of how hard working your heart muscles are. It beats 70 to 75 times per minute and to keep these muscles functional and working we need to feed them with oxygen and nutrients, right? That is what keeps any muscle of our body going and this oxygen and nutrients as you can see is received by the muscles through the blood. Now we know that the heart it pumps blood to all different body parts and it sends out that blood through the aorta. This is the aorta but if it is sending the whole blood out of the aorta how is it meeting the requirement of oxygen and nutrients that the cardiac muscles need? How is it feeding itself? Well the heart is very intelligent you see. It makes two outlets. From the aorta we call them coronary arteries that branches down into small arterioles and spreads through the heart muscles and supplies blood to all of the cardiac muscles. But over time with age certain depositions on these arteries, coronary arteries can lead to the obstruction of blood flow to the heart muscles. We call that the coronary artery disease. So in this video we will look at what these depositions are, how do they develop and what happens in coronary artery disease, are they even curable? Okay let's begin. So here we have a part of the coronary artery and if any part of the coronary artery is damaged the reason could be anything okay. It could be hypertension, it could be some infection. So let's say a part of the coronary artery's membrane is damaged then the cholesterol in the blood they find this to be a very sweet spot to settle down okay. But you must be already knowing that we have something called the macrophages or the WBCs okay. They are the police that takes care of our internal health okay. They keep an eye on on these kind of fishy activities inside our body. So when they see this cholesterol depositing there they immediately reach the spot okay to arrest the cholesterol. But in the fight between the cholesterol and the WBCs sadly the WBCs die. So the dead WBCs and the cholesterol they create an inflammation in the area okay. They create a bulge kind of a situation there and on top of that other constituents of the blood like calcium, fats and certain fibrous deposits also add on to that bulging and over time the arterial wall looks somewhat like this. The deposits grows bigger and bigger and we call it a plaque and this condition of the arteries is called atherosclerosis a very fancy name right but these fancy names in biology if we break it down it has very simple meanings okay. It is taken from a Greek word where athero means paste and sclerosis means hardening. So paste means the plaque that is that is pasted on the arterial wall and hardening because usually the arteries has elasticity right. It loses elasticity it becomes very hard due to the deposition of plaque and we call it atherosclerosis and you have to remember this fancy name at least for the sake of exams. Well situations like these do not have any symptoms so a person with atherosclerosis will have no idea that such a drama is going on in his coronary arteries okay until 70% or more of his coronary artery gets obstructed okay. So this plaque obstructs say 70% or more of the arteries lumen. Then 25 to 30% of the blood that could flow through the space that's there will be sufficient to feed the heart muscles at rest but during hypertension or physical exercise or emotional stress when the heartbeat increases the heart muscle will also demand more blood. Well if the arteries were normal without plaque in conditions like those the heart muscles would release chemicals that would dilate the coronary artery allowing more than normal blood to reach the cardiac muscles and the arteries were able to dilate because they had elasticity but in atrosclerosis remember what happened to the arterial wall they lost their elasticity they became hard so even though the cardiac muscle will send chemicals to dilate the arteries the arteries will not be able to dilate so not enough blood will be able to reach the cardiac muscle and in situations like these severe pain in the chest is felt by the patient and we call it angina pectoris where angina means strangle and pectoris means chest and the patient feels severe squeezing kind of pressure and it can radiate to the adjacent body parts and it can also be accompanied with shortness of breath and sweating but this is temporary as soon as the demand for more blood flow stops as soon as the stress subsides the person gets back to normal so let me write that it is only when the oxygen and nutrient demand to the heart is high otherwise the person will be completely normal now if the condition persists and the plaque keeps on growing obstructing the lumen even more that would cause severe heart issues severe than angina pectoris but we will keep that discussion for another video okay but talking about our patient with angina pectoris the first and foremost advice that the doctor would give him is to make healthy lifestyle changes like quitting smoking eating healthy diet with less cholesterol exercising regularly and he would also be given medications that would that would reduce or lower the amount of cholesterol deposit in his arteries and finally the last option would be certain surgeries that can remove the plaque now before I end the video I would like to tell you that if you are wondering that hey it is something that all people have in their arteries okay we are young we are in class 11th and 12th we don't need to worry about coronary artery disease or angina pectoris then let me tell you that doctors and researchers have found out that the tricks of these cholesterol deposits in the coronary arteries start at the age of 10 itself and obviously that is because of our poor eating habits and people would not know about it until a good portion of their arteries get subtracted so regular medical examinations and eating right is the only way to keep our arteries and our body healthy