This is the official website for the Multi-Ethnic Study of atherosclerosis (MESA), a huge study that has been following over 6,000 patients of different ethnicities since 2000! One of the really interesting parts of this study is that it is studying people WITHOUT symptoms of underlying atherosclerosis (in other words, they haven’t had any chest pain or heart attacks or strokes). Thank you very much to the student who drew my attention to this!!!

Why would you want to study people without symptoms? Because atherosclerosis is silent until it presents with nasty stuff like heart attacks, sudden death, stroke, etc. Maybe the researchers will find some characteristics that have been previously unidentified! And maybe they will find some new risk factors that have not been identified either!

There are some cool tools on the website, including one that calculates your likelihood of having a coronary heart disease event within the next 10 years! I was happy to find out that mine is very low (yay!).