Anatomy and Physiology of the Heart - Study Made Easy

Anatomy and physiology study is normally broken down into 12 sections, with each section representing one system of the body, for example, the endocrine system. When you begin revising, it is recommended that you take 1 system of the body and learn it on its own. Varied body systems are similar in nature so learning them together might cause confusion. Take each area of your anatomy and physiology study and write out brief notes on that area. To give you an example and for the purpose of this article I will give you a brief overview of the heart and it's role in blood circulation.

The heart is a hollow muscular organ, approximately the size of it's owner's fist. It is positioned in the town of the chest area, in the middle of the lungs and is divided into 4 chambers. The upper chambers are called the atria and the lower chambers are called the ventricles. The right and left sides of the heart are divided by a muscular wall called the septum, this prevents deoxygenated and oxygenated blood from mixing together.

If you can fantasize the pipe system in your house providing water and heat to you on a daily basis, metaphorically speaking, the house is your heart and the pipes are the blood vessels that are found throughout our bodies. Blood is pumped from the heart colse to all parts of the body through a complex vehicle system consisting of arteries, veins and capillaries (blood vessels). The heart beats approximately 100,000 times every day in order to furnish our cells with oxygen rich blood and pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through it's chambers on a daily basis.

Blood circulation follows a specific route and can be summed up as follows;

1. The right atrium receives deoxygenated blood from the excellent and inferior vena cava.

2. The blood is then pushed through the tricuspid valve down into the right ventricle. The tricuspid valve is a small flap that prevents the back flow of blood in the middle of the chambers on the right side.

3. Once the right ventricle fills up, the blood is then propelled into the pulmonary artery which then travels to the lungs where gaseous replacement occurs.

4. When the lungs take off the carbon dioxide, the deoxygenated blood becomes oxygenated and returns back to the heart via four pulmonary veins.

5. The blood enters the left atria via these pulmonary veins and is then pushed down into the left ventricle through the bicuspid valve. The bicuspid valve prevents the back flow of blood on the left side.

6. Once the left ventricle fills up it contracts, forcing the blood into the aorta which then branches to come to be the ascending aorta which supplies the upper body with oxygen rich blood and the descending aorta which supplies the lower body with oxygen rich blood.

7. Blood becomes deoxygenated once again and returns to the excellent and inferior vena cava where the process begins again.

As I mentioned above, this just gives you a brief overview of the heart, it's function and how it transports blood colse to the body. When you are carrying out any anatomy and physiology study, always make sure to summarize all areas as above. Using optical tools such as diagrams is a great way to spice up your notes. Even if you can't draw like picasso, it doesn't matter. To by comparison the heart you can draw a quadrate shape or a circle and divide it equally into 4 chambers. It just gives you an idea of the layout of the heart and it has been proven that learning visually can be much more productive than just reading something over and over again.

Physiology of Circulation

The heart receives all of the blood from colse to the body into the right atrium. The thoracic duct receives the lymph fluid from the lymph circulation and it empties into the previous vena cava just before it empties into the upper right chamber or the heart (right atrium). Here the blood then goes straight through the tricuspid or right A/V valve to the right ventricle. The wall of this ventricle is quite thin because the pressure under which it works is very low as compared to the other side of the circulation and the heart.

The blood then goes straight through the pulmonary valve into the pulmonary artery where it goes straight through progressively smaller vessels until it travels straight through the capillaries that surround the air sacs (alveoli) of the lungs where the oxygen that is brought in straight through the respiratory ideas combines with the hemoglobin of the red blood cell and the dissolved carbon dioxide is expelled straight through the air sacs of the lungs and exhaled straight through the larger and larger tubes of the lungs called bronchioles and bronchi and ultimately the trachea or wind pipe. The oxygenated blood is then brought straight through larger and larger veins from the pulmonary circulation to the pulmonary veins that associate and the well oxygenated blood is then emptied into the left upper chamber (left atrium) of the heart. The blood then travels straight through the bicuspid or mitral valve and enters the left lower chamber of the heart (the tricuspid valve) where it is then pumped out straight through the aortic valve into the aorta. Here the first vessels that receive the riches oxygenated blood are the coronary arteries, or the arteries to the heart.

The heart does all of the work or circulation and so it needs the best blood that the body can produce. This is why the coronary arteries come off the aortic arch right after the blood is pumped from the left ventricle. The wall of the left ventricle is many times thicker than the wall of the right side of the right ventricle. The blood pressure is many here in the left ventricle because of the force that has to be exerted by the lower left chamber of the heart to pump the blood back out to the whole body where the circulation becomes progressively added and added from the center of the heart and the size of the vessels becomes smaller and smaller in order to get the used blood back for resupplying the hemoglobin molecules with oxygen. The whole process of circulation takes roughly one dinky from the right side of the heart back to the right side of the heart again. This process repeats itself thousands of times an hour and millions of times in a day. Without the allowable circulation in all of the limbs and the extremities happening regularly, the cells and tissues of the body will shrivel up and die. The blood also carries all of the nutrients the discrete cells of the body need and transports waste that is produced by the cells from general functioning to the liver where it is detoxified and eliminated in the bile or in the urine as nontoxic waste straight through the bowel or straight through the kidneys and the urine.