In the twentieth century, advances in clinical medicine and public health measures have led to a marked reduction in the disease burden from infectious diseases and other acute illnesses. This has resulted in a worldwide increase in life expectancy compared to that in 1900. The emergence of non-infectious diseases such as cancer, heart attacks, and strokes have become the leading causes of death in many countries [[1], [2], [3], [4]]. Heart attacks and strokes were known to be associated with hardening and narrowing of the arteries, a condition given the name of arteriosclerosis in the nineteenth century [[5], [6], [7]]. By the mid-mid-twentieth century, the death rate from coronary artery disease (CAD), a major form of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, had reached over 400 per 100,000 individuals in developed countries, and CAD had become the number one cause of death worldwide [[1], [2], [3], [4]]. The clinical cardiac condition was also referred to as coronary heart disease (CHD) or ischemic heart disease (IHD), with the latter patho-physiological designation being the preferred term used in this review [[8], [9], [10]].

Little was known about the factors responsible for the increasing number of deaths from atherosclerosis-related diseases. This high disease burden has led to an urgent need to study their causes and develop strategies for reducing the number of atherosclerotic diseases as a cause of death. This has led to the investigation of atherosclerosis by a broad array of specialists, including epidemiologists, cardiologists, pathologists, and biomedical scientists [2,[11], [12], [13]].