27th September: World Heart Day

Today is World Heart Day, so here are ten things you might not know about hearts.

1. Old words for heart include the Old English heorte, Latin cor and Greek kardia, from which we get the words cardiology and cardiac. The chambers of the heart are called the left and right atrium (Latin for entrance hall) and the left and right ventricle (Latin for little belly).
2. A human heart pumps out 2 ounces of Blood each time it beats. That's 2.500 gallons a day. As it can beat anything up to 3.5 billion times in a lifetime, we're talking 1.5 million barrels of blood, enough to fill 200 train tank cars, over the course of a person's life. You'd have to leave your kitchen tap running at full pelt 24 hours a day for 45 years to pump out the equivalent amount in water. All this from an organ which is about the size of your fist and weighs about the same as an Apple.
3. The heart does the most physical work of any muscle during a lifetime. Every day, the heart creates enough energy to drive a lorry 20 miles. That means in a lifetime, the heart produces enough energy to drive the same lorry to the Moon and back. The heart has its own electrical impulse, so it can keep on beating even if taken out of the body, provided it has an Oxygen supply.
4. While we know today that the heart is basically a blood pump, in ancient times, people had different ideas about what it was for. In ancient Egypt, they thought the heart could move around inside the body with a will of its own. It was Plato who theorised that the heart was responsible for passion and Aristotle believed sensory input was transported to the heart through the blood and the heart was responsible for thought and emotions. In Old English, “heart” meant breast, soul, spirit, mind and intellect. Hence we have phrases like "to learn by heart" and "heartfelt". Erasistratus of Chios (304-250 B.C.) was the first to discover that the heart functioned as a natural pump.
5. All this aside, the association of the heart with love isn't necessarily complete balderdash. It's been found that if a couple stare into each other's eyes for three minutes their heart rates synchronise; and broken hearts are real. Strong emotions and stress, which breakups and bereavements can cause, can result in a condition called "takotsubo's cardiomyopathy" or "broken heart syndrome."
6. The device a doctor uses to listen to a patient's heart, the stethoscope, was invented by French physician Rene Laennec (1781-1826). Before this, a doctor had to actually place his ear on a patient's chest to listen to their heart. Laennec invented the stethoscope so he wouldn't have to put his ear against women's breasts.
7. Women's hearts naturally beat faster than men's. Male hearts beat at 70 beats a minute and female hearts at 78 beats a minute. On average. A person's heart rate can speed up or slow down depending on the type of Music they are listening to, and studies have shown that people who practice yoga have lower heart rates, at least while they are meditating. Laughter relaxes the blood vessels and is therefore good for the heart because it doesn't need to work quite so hard.
8. The pressure a human heart generates is strong enough to squirt blood thirty feet across a room. Blood leaves the heart at a speed of about 1 mile (1.6 km) per hour, but as it travels through the body, it slows down. By the time it gets to the capillaries, it will be moving at 43 inches (109 cm) per hour.
9. I'm not in the business of health scaremongering - I'll leave that to the Daily Mail, but I will pass on a couple of interesting facts about heart attacks. The peak times for heart attacks are Monday mornings and Christmas. While having an active sex life is quoted as being good for the heart in general, men who are having affairs are more likely to suffer a cardiac arrest during sex.
10. A few words about hearts elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The smallest heart belongs to the Alpatus magnimius, a type of fruit fly - it is less than 0.21mm long. The largest belongs to the blue Whale, which has a heart which weighs up to 900kg and is the size of a Mini Cooper. An Octopus has three hearts (eat one of your hearts out, Doctor Who). Two to pump blood through the gills, one to pump it around the body. In general, the larger the mammal, the slower its heart rate is (the world’s smallest mammal, the Etruscan shrew, has a heart rate of 835 beats a minute) and the slower the heart rate, the longer the animal lives (the shrew only lives for about a year). Humans are the exception, probably because medicine and hygiene have extended human lives.

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