Calcium buildup in arteries starts as the body's attempt to stabilize inflamed plaque, like a bandage. But high calcium scores predict worse heart outcomes. The real goal is stopping inflammation before your body hardens the plaque in the first place.
The next thing is, and there's different ideas, theories about this. The first part of atherosclerosis is very bad. It's full of inflammation, full of immune cells that shouldn't be inside of your blood vessel walls. And so one of the ways that the body tries to calm it down is to send calcium and other molecules there to build a hard plaque that's like a bandage and says, let's cover this inflammation up. So then some people will say, well, okay, so that means then the calcium is actually good because it's like a bandage covering up a wound. Well, yes and no. The goal would be to deal with your coronary artery calcification and inflammation before we get to the calcium bandage part so that we don't have to build up all of this calcium. Because then the other group of people would say, well, no, the calcification's not a good sign because high coronary artery calcification scores are associated with worse outcomes.
