Disease in our arteries can begin as early as our teenage years.

Oftentimes, a body’s resistance to insulin — a natural hormone produced by the pancreas — leads to Type 2 diabetes and disease in your blood vessels. Insulin resistance can also eventually result in cardiovascular disease significant enough to cause a heart attack or stroke.

Other factors can harm your arteries, as well, and most heart attacks and strokes are the end result of that damaged condition — however it starts. Yet, the problem develops so silently, six of every 10 Americans who have suffered a heart attack never knew they had cardiovascular disease.

Blood clots cause the majority of heart attacks and all ischemic strokes; an ischemic stroke happens when an artery in your brain is blocked.

Clot formation is just the end of a long process. It begins as inflammation in the arteries incited by cholesterol. In response to the inflammation, plaque pushes its way under the artery lining, causing the arteries to thicken. A weakened artery will fight to hold in the unstable plaque, but the plaque can rupture without warning, breaking through the vessel wall. The body senses danger and rushes repair cells to the scene.

What happens next could change a life forever: Those repair cells form a blood clot, which blocks the artery. A clot the size of a baby aspirin can stop a heart or trigger a stroke.