About Heart Disease – First, let’s learn how a healthy heart works!

Before we can really understand what can go wrong with our hearts and our cardiovascular systems, we first need to understand what a healthy, functioning heart does.

If you were to live seventy years, your heart would beat around 2.5 billion times, and pump around 180 million liters of blood around your body!  The heart is about the size of your fist, and it is found slightly left in your chest.  It is a muscular organ that is hollow, and separated into four main areas:  the right atrium, right ventricle, and the left atrium and left ventricle.  The right atrium and the right ventricle are separated from the left atrium and the left ventricle by a wall called the septum.  This separation prevents oxygenated blood from mixing with non-oxygenated blood.  To keep blood from flowing backwards, the heart has valves located between the atria and the ventricles. These valves only open one way, and open and close once per heartbeat.

When blood that has circulated throughout your body returns to your heart, it is non-oxygenated and passes through the right side of the heart.  The right ventricle pumps blood through the pulmonary arteries to the lungs where the blood picks up oxygen again, and then returns back to the left side of the heart.  When blood leaves the left ventricle and passes through the aorta of the heart, it is full of oxygen.  This blood is then circulated throughout your body, providing the rest of the body with the required oxygen and nutrients.

This pumping of blood out of the heart’s ventricles occurs when the ventricles contract – called systole.  This is the top measurement that your doctor reads when taking your blood pressure.  When the ventricles relax and fill up with blood that is coming from the atria, this is called diastole.  This is the bottom measurement that your doctor reads when taking your blood pressure.

Our hearts also beat in a regular rhythm, which is controlled by its own conduction system.  It is like having its own electrical wire system.  This conduction begins in a specialized area of the heart, and spreads throughout the rest of the heart to keep it beating regularly.

Hopefully, this gives you some idea of what the heart is.  In future posts,  we can start to understand about heart disease, the causes, and different types of heart disease.