John Osborne argues that total plaque volume throughout the heart, not isolated blockages, predicts heart attacks and death. Doctors and patients often focus on single stenoses, but the overall plaque burden is what actually drives outcomes.
What actually does predict mortality, cardiovascular mortality, deaths from strokes and heart attacks, and heart attacks, is actually, ready for this, total— So as it turns out, it is not the blockages that we have been looking for and fixing mechanically for decades. That is not what predicts heart attacks or mortality. What actually does predict mortality, cardiovascular mortality, deaths from strokes and heart attacks, and heart attacks, is actually, ready for this, total whole heart Plaque volume. And that's what we're going to look at in you in just a moment. But I think it's so important to set that stage because I think a lot of people intuitively goes, oh, I got a bad blockage. Thank God. Thank goodness it was found. We put a stent in it. Whew. Avoided. Crisis avoided.
