Here’s seven more facts about your heart to make it skip a beat!
Read part one here.
8. The heart can continue beating even when disconnected from the body.
Equipped with its own electrical system, the heart can continue to beat for a short while after brain death or upon being disconnected from the body, provided sufficient oxygen is available. Clearly, they weren’t joking when they said that the heart has a mind of its own!
9. The heart beats about 115,000 times each day.
That’s around 72 times a minute multiplied by 60 minutes an hour multiplied by 24 hours in a day.
10. The heart pumps around 7500 litres of blood every day.
That’s more than five litres of blood every minute, and roughly four tablespoons in each beat!
11. The coronary arteries are called so because they encircle your heart on top just like a crown.
Corona is Latin for crown. Get the drift?
12. If you were to stretch out all of the heart’s blood vessels, they’d be nearly 100,000 kilometres long!
Just to put it into perspective, that’s nearly a third of the distance from Earth to the Moon!
13. A woman’s heart beats almost 8 beats a minute faster than a man’s.
Speed and strength!
14. Cardiovascular disease is the commonest cause of death in the world.
Not a happy statistic, this. Astoundingly, as much as 30% of all deaths are reportedly because of heart disease. We don’t mean to scare you, but please – take care of your heart (click to see how), and educate yourself about the different things that can go wrong with the heart.
And finally, click here to see how at Healthwatch we’ve been listening to the heart since 2010.
