Atherosclerosis is a complex disease in which progressive cellular changes occur for
decades before the acute manifestation of cardiovascular disease. Definition of atherogenic
mechanisms in humans is hindered by the complexity and chronicity of the disease process,
combined with the inability to sequentially characterize lesions in an individual patient
because of shortcomings in noninvasive detection modalities. Therefore, there has been a
reliance on animal models of the disease to define mechanistic pathways. Over the last …