An angiogram is a diagnostic procedure with dye and radiation, the other is a medical procedure to compress the plaques against the artery wall and open things up as in balloon angioplasty.

I am really out of my realm of expertise here, but I will tell you what I have learned from pursuing my own issues only. I want to state clearly that I know lots less about this than I do about cancer and viruses. Balloon agioplasty does indeed smash the build ups against the walls of the artery essentially opening them up, but this is not a permanent situation. You may have to have this done repeatedly. While a very safe procedure that million of which have been done, there is always the risk of braking off a piece of the buildup, and that causing the very thing you were trying to prevent, as that chunk gets pumped down into progressively smaller vessels. Yes you can get put on blood thinners and clot dissolvers while this is all settling in, but shit happens. Ditto when they put in a stent. Stent insertions have had a problem of damaging things and creating clots also, so they started coating them with compounds that would reduce their propensity to do this. Turns out that in long term studies, the coatings had their own issues and did not fully resolve the problem anyway. Having your stent throw a clot is a stroke maker in itself. IN MY OWN PERSONAL SITUATION, I have made the decision to live with things as they are, accepting some of this as part of the new post treatment me. Since it has gotten worse between year 5 and 10, I expect that it might continue to do so, and I will not always have the luxury of this decision and at some point down the road a stent will be the only option for me. I am not there yet, and maybe some MAC truck will take care of me before I get there.

When you consider the "fattening" of America, the foods that the vast majority of American eat (and the volumes of it), the lack of exercise, etc. etc. it is no surprise that the issues of hypertension, and other artery disease, as well as cardiac issues, are at the top of the list of things that kill people. Decades of lifestyle behaviors that put people in these situations cannot easily be undone with a bypass, a stent, or drugs to reduce blood fats, though it is a multi billion dollar marketplace to deal with for the pharma and medical industries.