Certain things in life comes when we have the patience to wait for the right time. That same thing holds true in medical science and technology. Where cardiac events had been known for its bad reputation as a "thief in the night," right now it can be predicted with sensible accuracy. THE recent wave of science and technology developments in medicine, particularly in Japan, gave rise to a better way of predicting deadly turns in coronary artery disease (CAD). As of 2006, CAD is the leading cause of death in Taiwan. And the disease results from degenerative stiffening of blood vessels in the body, called atherosclerosis. During the later part of the 20th century, Japan came up with a technology that measures the stiffness of arteries using pulse wave velocity (PWV). The basic scientific principles of PWV through the arterial tree dates back to 1808 when Thomas Young started investigating it. As early as 1998, carotid-femoral PWV (cfPWV), the use of PWV in as
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