Introduction
Atherosclerosis is a progressive inflammatory disease characterized by excessive deposition of cholesterol in the arterial wall. Despite intensive therapeutic treatment opportunities the atherosclerotic complications are still the leading cause of death in Western industrialized countries.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was probably the first who described the macroscopic changes of atherosclerosis, when he illustrated the lesions in arteries obtained from an elderly man at autopsy. His visionary idea was that the pathological thickening of the arterial wall was due to ‘excessive nourishment’ from the blood. Many decades later da Vinci׳s observation was studied in more detail by Carl von Rokitansky (1852) and Rudolf L. K. Virchow (1821–1902). In 1856 Virchow proposed that injury of the endothelium may initiate the disease process of atherosclerosis. Based on this idea, Russell Ross (1929–1999) and John A. Glomset came up in 1973 with the ‘response-to-injury’ hypothesis which is still generally accepted today in the form of the more generalized concept of endothelial dysfunction as the initial cause of atherosclerosis.