The heart is the pumping plant of the human body that pumps the blood throughout the body. Its circulatory system supplies oxygen along with other nutrients to the tissues and also removes carbon dioxide with other wastes.
To simply put it, the heart helps in keeping the body tissues active and alive by providing them with nutrition and oxygen, or else they will die. Thus, any issue with cardiovascular health needs to be given immense importance.
Heart diseases can range from mild to severe and in the situations where treatment and medication can’t cure the diseases and the heart stops functioning, a heart transplant is been carried out. So in order to develop an in-depth understanding of the heart transplant, let’s first know about a few of the important aspects.
EMBRYOLOGY OF THE HEART
The human heart is about the size of a fist of the person with a weight of around 280 to 340 grams in men, and it is around 230 to 280 grams in women.
The human heart can be described as the muscular pump which is divided into four chambers along with the same number of valves which helps in preventing the backflow of the blood.
- The upper chambers in the heart are called left and right atria,
- The two at the bottom side are called ventricles.
The atria receive the blood from the different parts of the body and the ventricles have the work of pumping the blood back to the different body parts.
Though it is as small as your fist, the heart is powered enough to keep the blood flowing through nearly 60,000 miles of blood vessels connecting to organs, muscles, and tissues.
WHAT IS THE UNDERLYING CAUSE FOR HEART DISEASE?
Since the heart is also a muscle which needs blood to revive, therefore when the blood is pumped to the entire body via aortic valve, two sets of arteries then supply the heart with oxygenated blood in order to feed the muscle.
Over time, increase in fat and cholesterol deposits causes plaques in the arteries. This blocks the arteries and restricts the blood flow. Such a condition may either result in a heart attack or it can damage any of the heart muscle.
There are two different terms i.e. heart attack and cardiac arrest, where cardiac arrest refers to the loss of the heart function suddenly due to the electrical disturbances in the heart rhythm. One of the causes of the cardiac arrest can be a heart attack but there can be other causes too.
For adults, there can be several causes for heart failure which can be as follows:
- Coronary heart diseases
- Conditions or the problems passed down in the heredity
- Heart’s viral infection
- Damaged muscles and the heart valves
