Welcome to our website! We are under construction and we’re going to launch the website in phases. Our goal is to become the educational resource for the human heart and how it works. We’ll cover topics about the heart, cardiovascular system and heart diseases. We’ll bring information from doctors and always site our resources as we are not medical doctors ourselves. We’d like to give a brief overview of the human heart:

A normal human heart is muscle tissue about the size of a fist. It is the “pump” that keeps blood circulating throughout the body. The circulatory system is a closed loop system (ideally), which means that the blood exits the heart with oxygen to and delivers blood to the body via arteries. The blood drops off oxygen in the cells of the body and returns without oxygen to the heart in our veins. You may notice that your veins look blue or bluish which is the color of blood when it is not oxygenated. When blood is oxygenated, it is bright red. Most veins carry blood without oxygen and that blood is returned to the right atrium. The exception to the rule is the pulmonary vein which does carry oxygenated blood as it is the vein that returns blood from the lungs to the heart but let’s break down the basics of the heart first.

The heart is made up of four chambers: the upper 2 chambers are the left and right atrium and the lower two chambers are the left and right ventricle. The blood flows through the four chambers aided by “one way” valves that allow blood flow in only one direction. The four valves are: the tricuspid valve (between the right atrium and right ventricle), the pulmonary valve (between right ventricle and the pulmonary artery), the mitral valve (between the left atrium and left ventricle) and the aortic valve (between the left ventricle and aorta). Every valve is assisted by three “flaps” except the mitral valve which has two flaps. The mitral valve is also known as the bicuspid valve. This makes sense when you know that flaps can also be called cusps or leaflets.

As mentioned above, the blood enters the heart without oxygen into the right atrium. It then passes through the tricuspid valve (with three flaps) and into the right ventricle. Then, the blood leaves the heart through the pulmonary artery, goes to the lungs, gets oxygenated (and turns bright red) and then returns to the left atrium through the pulmonary veins. From the left atrium, the blood passes into the left ventricle through the mitral valve. The blood leaves the left ventricle through the aorta valve and into the aorta known as the systemic artery. Arteries are the vessels that carry blood away from the heart. All arteries carry oxygenated blood except for the pulmonary artery (which carries the blood from the heart to the lungs) and the umbilical artery which carry blood from the fetus to the placenta through the umbilical cord.

As is all the anatomy of the body, the human heart is part of the miracle of life. We’ll get into more functionality and the hearts integration with the nervous system and medulla oblongata. We’ll provide diagrams, sketches, recommend heart healthy foods and research any information our readers want: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it