This isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think of atherosclerosis as kind of like the scene of a crime—breaking and entering, more or less. Let’s say we have a street, which represents the blood vessel, and the street is lined with houses, representing the arterial wall. The fence in front of each house is analogous to something called the endothelium, a delicate but critical layer of tissue that lines all our arteries and veins, as well as certain other tissues, such as the kidneys. Composed of just a single layer of cells, the endothelium acts as a semipermeable barrier between the vessel lumen
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