Readers jumped at the idea of atherosclerosis growing out of muscles.
Let me remind you that we are talking about about the muscles in the walls of the arteries.
So we all have the rudiments of atherosclerosis from infancy. These are strips of fat on the inside of your arteries.
In fact, this is not so much smeared butter, but rather immune cells stuffed with drops of fat.
This fat would lie there and would not touch anyone, but muscle cells interfere.
These are usually those muscle cells that live in the thickness of the arterial wall and control the tone of the arteries.
Muscle cells become bored in the thickness of the wall, and they crawl out from there closer to the lumen of the vessel. There, under the fatty strips, muscle cells begin to multiply and grow. At the same time, they erect scaffolding around themselves of connective tissue.
As a result, the artery wall thickens.
Stem cells
In addition to muscle cells that have crawled out of the artery wall, muscle cells also appear in the sore spot, which were formed right on the spot from stem cells.
A small number of stem cells float in our blood. They are waiting to be repaired in our body. And so they notice that there is some kind of construction going on in the walls of the arteries, which is commanded by muscle cells. Stem cells decide to turn into muscle and help build. So the muscle cells become even more.
Apoptosis
The problem with muscle cells is not only that they multiply and grow, blocking the lumen of the vessel. Muscle cells still know how to die at the wrong time. This is programmed cell death that is very common inside our body.
The devil knows why the muscle cells had to die, but this does not go away with impunity. In place of cell death, immunity is tightened and begins to rake the debris of cells. This case is accompanied by inflammation. Everything there swells, calcium is deposited, and cellular corpses are lying around.
Plaque
It turns out that before the intervention of muscle cells, there were just harmless fatty strips on the inner wall of the arteries, but very quickly everything turns into an abscess that slowly matures.
This is already a real atherosclerotic plaque. It doesn't just block the lumen of the artery. The plaque can break at any time, and a blood clot will quickly grow in its purulent middle.
This clot can simultaneously block a large artery or fall apart, float further downstream and block many small arteries.
This is what happens in the arteries. And all because of the layer of muscle cells.
There are very few muscle cells in the vein wall, so there is no atherosclerosis in the veins.
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