On The Hunt For Vulnerable Plaque InfraReDx Improves Stenting Safety

Whatever happened to vulnerable plaque? More than a decade ago, vulnerable plaque was a hot topic that was hoped would explain many incidents of sudden cardiac death in patients without other symptoms of coronary artery disease. While many experts believe the theory underlying this concept remains sound, proving its validity and then developing both diagnostic tools to identify what have been called "vulnerable patients" and then therapeutic devices to treat them has turned out to be a difficult and lengthy challenge that remains unsolved.

In the late 1980s, it began to appear that up to 75% of first-time heart attacks weren't predicted by the usual signs of arterial narrowing; they weren't necessarily the result of the slow growth of fibrotic plaques that cause stenosis. It seemed that a different kind of plaque with a particular type of lipid core was at fault; this type of plaque would rupture and cause a thrombus leading to a non-fatal myocardial infarction or cardiac death. Several start-ups were funded ten or so years ago around new technologies for finding these lipid-core plaques, and many have foundered and failed