Do you know your heart?

Your heart is one if not the most important organ in the body, and it’s useful to have a basic understanding of how it works, so you can fix it when it goes wrong (joking), please see you GP if you have any concerns at all, no matter how small.

Your heart is located between your lungs in the middle of your chest and slightly to the left of your breastbone (sternum). Roughly weighing between 200 - 425 g and roughly the sized of your clenched fist. By the end of your life, it may have beaten more than 3.5 billion times on average pumping out 7, 571 litres of blood per day.

Your heart is a complex muscle, and the muscle tissue is known as the myocardium. The heart pumps blood through 3 divisions of the circulatory system, the coronary (vessels that serve the heart), pulmonary (heart and lungs), and the systemic system (the rest of the body). Consisting of two decisive sides the right and the left. The right side receives and sends deoxygenated blood to the lungs and therefore is smaller, with the left sending oxygenated blood to the whole body via the systemic system.

Divided into four chambers two atria (upper chambers) and two ventricles (lower chambers), one on each side. The atria receive the blood and the ventricles eject or pump the blood out, which stands to their size difference, the chambers being bigger than the atria. The left ventricle is the largest and the strongest of all the chambers, as it must produce enough force to drive blood around the entire systemic system.

The right-hand side receives deoxygenated blood (in blue) via the vena cava (VC) (superior VC from the head, neck and upper limbs, & inferior VC from the rest of the body) which enters into the right atria, falling into the chamber below (right ventricle) with the help of gravity. Once the chamber is full, an electrical signal is sent and the heart contracts ejecting blood to the lungs to be re-oxygenated.

Once the blood is re-oxygenated (in red) it enters the left side of the heart via the left atria, falling into the chamber below (left ventricle). Once the chamber is full, the heart contracts and blood is ejected and sent to the coronary and systemic systems, via the aorta, the main artery in the body. The right and left-hand side of the heart work simultaneously together.

The body’s circulation is a closed-loop one-way system, filled with well-placed valves preventing the backflow of blood, the heart is no different. Valves are located between the atria and ventricles, ventricles to arteries etc.

The transport network for the blood are the arteries, capillaries and veins. Arteries take blood away from the heart, capillaries allow the exchange of oxygenated blood, and nutrients in exchange for deoxygenated blood, and waste products, which are transported back to the heart and the lymphatic system via the veins. If all the vessels in this system were laid end-to-end, they would extend 60,000 miles, enough to circle the world more than twice.

This is a small overview of a vital organ; hopefully, this has given you little more insight or refreshed some of the knowledge you already had.

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