How Cholesterol Plaque Forms

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell and on behalf of Expert Village today I'm going to talk to you about the subject of lowering cholesterol. Now in this clip we can talk about how plaques are formed. Plaques are like clots of cholesterol all stuck together and sticking on the vessel walls. So here's a diagram that I've drawn of a blood vessel. Here's a blood vessel and we've just cut across the blood vessel itself. So we are looking at the inside of the blood vessel. Now normally a healthy blood vessel doesn't have any deposits on side of the wall. You can see here so that blood can flow very freely through the blood vessel without any impedance or any obstruction. When people have terrible diets. When they are eating high, fatty diets or certain drugs can also cause it or certain diseases and medication will cause certain deposits to flow through the blood vessels. Especially on people who are on terrible diets. These fats and deposits then stop to deposit on the edge of the vessel walls as it moves along the vessel down. So it starts building up over years. So as you keep or continue to eat a terrible diet or if you have certain medications that causes this secretion collection of fatty deposits. Eventually over time you are going to form a plaque and here you can see that we have these red bumps or the plaques that are formed inside the vessel itself and when that happens over time you are going to get obstruction of the flow of blood through the capillary. These plaques will obstruct the flow and eventually the plaques will build up to a point where it's going to keep depositing and then you are going to have total occlusion of the vessel we called obstruction of the vessel. So then you're going to stop any blood flowing through the vessel itself and that if it happens in a major artery you are going to get cardiovascular problems. You're going to get strokes and heart attacks. So that is why as medical doctors and also to inform the public that you should always reduce the type of food that has high, fatty content and also to exercise and eat healthy to prevent the risk of getting plaque formation and to get cardiovascular problems."