What is a “heart attack” anyway?
About the Heart
The Australian Heart Foundation defines your heart as “…a muscle that pumps blood to all parts of the body.” By the same token Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is a collection of sounds and William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence is a set of letters strung together.
Yes, your heart is a pump. But what a pump! It is to pumps what the Mona Lisa is to painting or what Tiger Woods is to golf. It is the king of pumps.
Today your heart will most likely beat more than a hundred thousand times. Over an 80-year lifetime your heart will beat more than three billion times.
But it’s not only the number of beats that is so impressive; its’ the way your heart is able to respond almost instantly to your body’s needs that makes it such an amazing piece of engineering. My resting heart rate is about 57 beats per minute. But when I’m cycling as fast as I am able up a hill my heart rate may exceed 140 beats per minute. Once I’ve crested the hill my heart rate drops again. Depending on my level of effort it may drop to below 120 within a minute or two.
In a fit young athlete the range of heartbeats could rise from a resting 55 beats per minute to 180 beats per minute or more in seconds.
The pumping capacity of the heart is astonishing. The average person’s heart pumps about 20 litres (+- 5 US gallons) of blood per minute. That enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 5 days.
Get that. In less than a week that tiny little organ, about the size of your fist, pumps enough liquid to fill an Olympic size swimming pool.
Naturally such an active little organ requires a lot of energy to keep going. Your heart uses about 12% of the calories you consume every day. Roughly one out of every eight calories you consume is used to keep your heart going.
What is a “Heart Attack”?
An intricate network of arteries, the coronary arteries, envelopes your heart and delivers nutrient rich oxygenated blood to the heart muscle. And that’s where problems start.
Sometimes one of the coronary arteries will develop a sudden blockage. When that happens a part of the heart muscle becomes starved of oxygen and nutrients and quickly dies. Coronary artery blockage is the cause of more than 80% of all heart attacks.
Heart muscle does not regenerate. Once you’ve lost part of your heart muscle it’s gone forever. You have a permanent impairment. So avoiding heart attacks is important.
But how do arteries get blocked? And what role to those dreaded LDLs play?
The answers may surprise you.
Tags: artery, attack, cholesterol, coronary, HDL, heart, LDL, statins