Your heart beats for you.

1 minute read

A Beating Heart

From the movement you were born, your heart keeps on beating, pumping gallons of blood through it so that all the tissues in the body can get fresh nutrients and get rid of those old, used toxic products from them.

Just like the brain is the center of the nervous system, heart is the center of the cardiovascular system. It collects used, deoxygenated blood containing more carbon dioxide and send it to the lungs. It also collects the fresh, oxygenated blood from the lungs and sends it to various organs in the body(except the lungs).

In order to collect blood and send it to lungs and collect back from the lungs, human heart assumes a four chambered structures. The upper ones are called the atria, the lower ones are called the ventricles. Atria are for collecting and ventricles are for pushing.

Structure of Heart

Of all the four chambers, the left ventricle, which is the left lower part, strains more than any other chamber as its function is to pump blood to all the distant parts in the body, is naturally larger than the other three chambers.

In between the upper chambers or atria and the lower chambers or ventricles, there are valves, whose function is to prevent backflow, i.e., they maintain unidirectional flow of blood from the atria into the ventricles. These valves are named after the number of cusps in each of them, i.e., bicuspid valve on the left side and tricuspid valve on the right side.

The opening of the ventricles, on right and left side are also gaurded by valves, whose function is again to maintain forward flow and prevent backflow. These valves are named after the vessel they are connected with, i.e., the pulmonary valve on the left side, which opens into the pulmonary artery and the aortic valve on the right side, which opens into the aorta.