What are the main signs and symptoms of coronary artery disease?

Damage to the coronary arteries begins early in life, and is usually without major symptoms until things get pretty bad. At that point, one of the main symptoms of CAD is chest pain (angina) that lasts on the order of minutes (as opposed to hours or seconds)^[1]. However, the specifics of how this feels, when it occurs, and what’s associated with the pain depend on the specifics of the clinical disease; heart attacks (where a clot breaks off from a ruptured athrosclerotic plaque and blocks a narrower downstream artery) are different from, say, stable ischemic heart disease (where pain appears upon exertion and settles down afterwards).