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One of the ways doctors explain how heart attacks happen is through a metaphor about plumbing. The arteries to the heart get furred up with cholesterol-laden plaques, narrowing and eventually blocking off the blood supply, like the way that water pipes get coated inside with limescale.

But another theory says that the plumbing idea of heart disease is misleading, or at least, is not the whole story.

Rather than a physical blockage of our arteries, the main cause of heart attacks is actually inflammation, a process involving the immune system. New

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