From the yellow spot on the aorta to the lipid profile: one atherosclerosis course across three stages of training
For teachers of pathological anatomy, internal medicine and residency: a shared starting point before specialty teaching, with a module for each discipline and the guideline editions named in the course.
Published on 30 September 2026, Atherosclerosis: From Lipid Infiltration to Clinical Outcomes is listed in English; its Russian edition is also published. By its catalogue record it has 26 lessons and 136 minutes of study. After the introduction come four modules: aetiology and risk factors, pathogenesis and morphology of the stages, the clinical picture by vascular territory, and diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Each ends with an eight-question checkpoint with a 70% pass mark. The final exam has 25 questions, a 75% pass mark and two attempts, and by the course's own description at least a third of the questions analyse a generalised teaching case without real names or dates.
Targets from 2019, risk scales from 2025
The course names its clinical basis with editions: the 2019 ESC/EAS Guidelines for the management of dyslipidaemias, their 2025 Focused Update, the 2024 ESC Guidelines for the management of chronic coronary syndromes, and the Kazakhstan Ministry of Health clinical protocol «Atherogenic lipid metabolism disorders (dyslipidaemias)» No. 196 of 7 December 2023. It states what the update changed and what it left alone: the LDL-C targets by risk category stay as set in 2019, while SCORE2 and SCORE2-OP replace SCORE for ten-year risk assessment in people aged 40–89 without known cardiovascular disease.
The open lesson on LDL-C starts from the 2010 Cholesterol Treatment Trialists' Collaboration meta-analysis of 26 randomised statin trials involving about 170 000 participants, and from the average 20% relative risk reduction per 1 mmol/L lower LDL-C that the ESC/EAS 2025 Focused Update uses for illustration. In the update's worked examples of ten-year risk, a 1 mmol/L reduction changes 20% to about 16% and 10% to about 8%; the lesson presents this as an average effect, not an individual prognosis. It ends by separating a laboratory form's "normal up to 3.0 mmol/L" from the risk-based LDL-C target for a patient after myocardial infarction under the 2019 ESC/EAS Guidelines, retained by the 2025 Focused Update.
Where each module fits in the timetable
Pathological anatomy: the module on pathogenesis and morphology, from the foam cell through fatty streaks, the fibrous plaque and complicated lesions to atherocalcinosis, with its checkpoint as the entry check before the specimen session.
Internal medicine: the module on vascular territories, one lesson each for the coronary, cerebral, lower-limb, aortic and renal beds, as preparation before ward rounds.
Residency: the lessons on reading a lipid profile and on lowering LDL-C (targets, steps, what to add), with the final exam as a self-check before a cardiology rotation.
In any of these cycles, set the three opening lessons as reading before the first class. Those three text lessons are available without an account; the remaining text lessons require registration. Checkpoint and final-assessment quiz content is withheld publicly, and students can enrol in the course themselves.
What stays with the cardiology and neurology departments
The course does not replace a full course in cardiology, neurology, angiology or pathological anatomy. It does not teach coronary intervention or thrombolysis in stroke, is not a guide to acute coronary syndrome, and does not cover vasculitides or the non-atherosclerotic causes of aortic aneurysm. By the course's own note, a current full text of a Kazakhstan protocol on stable ischaemic heart disease was not found in open access, so the treatment of chronic coronary syndromes rests on ESC 2024; where an organisation works to a different local document, that document has to be opened separately.