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Lecture Notes

Atherosclerosis is the first type of cardiovascular disease that we'll talk about, and you can see in the Greek word origins here that really we're talking about the hardening of the plaque that occurs inside the artery walls, and this is a very slow, progressive disease that usually develops in early adulthood and then develops over decades and potentially even starts before early adulthood. People are usually asymptomatic, meaning they have no symptoms from atherosclerosis.