I know that eating healthy foods and doing cardio will reduce plaque buildup and decrease your risk but it seems like there’s nothing you can do to get the buildup out once is there. All the advice is about prevention not elimination
In: Biology
Plaque doesn’t form on the inside of the artery, it forms inside the walls. It’s so well incorporated that you can’t easily scrape it out.
It’s also a dangerous proceedure, plaque that breaks off can travel through your blood stream like a rogue blood clot and potentially cause a stroke.
That doesn’t mean that this will always be the case though.
In time technology like micro machines or new treatments and drugs might be able to eat away at the plaque in a safe manner.
Cholesterol and fat don’t dissolve in your blood, but both are necessary for your body to function. To dissolve them, one of the things that your body does is to make proteins called LDL that form a sort of protein bubble around cholesterol and fat. Those balls of LDL protein and fat *can* dissolve in your blood.
The outer protein layer of an LDL ball allows it to dissolve in blood, but it also prevents it from being able to enter your body’s cells. To get around this, your body’s cells have a receptor on their cell membrane that looks for a very specific protein chain that normally sticks out of the side of an LDL ball. When the receptor senses that chain it causes the cell to “eat” the LDL ball.
Oxygen from your blood can get into those LDL balls and react with the fat inside of them, oxidizing it. This reaction *can* alter the shape of the LDL ball. Many of the alterations to the shape of the LDL ball have no effect on its function. However, some of those alterations will cause the protein chain that your cells normally use to eat LDL balls to get sucked into the inside of the ball. When that happens, your body’s cells no longer recognize the LDL ball as an LDL ball and don’t eat it.
Those oxidized LDL balls float around in your blood until they encounter a type of white blood cell that patrols the space inside of your artery walls. Those white blood cells don’t know what the oxidized LDL ball is and treat it like a bacteria, engulfing it. The chemicals that your white blood cells use to destroy bacteria have no effect on the oxidized LDL ball, and so oxidized LDL starts to accumulate in the white blood cells in your arteries.
Those white blood cells will spend the rest of your life trying to destroy the oxidized LDL using a mechanism that has no effect on it – which is why you can’t get rid of the plaque formed by those white blood cells. Basically, your body has no mechanism to identify the oxidized LDL and, as a result, tries to get rid of it in a way that is completely ineffective at doing so.
Bad answers here. Truth (from med school) is that, while we can use a lot of fats for energy, we cannot produce enzymes that break down some trans fats, for example. Since we can’t break them down, they build up. Our white blood cells try to deal with them, but end up stuck in our blood vessel walls and cannot be broken down. They build up over time since we do not have a mechanism to break them down or excrete them. This sucks and is the cause of atherosclerosis.
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