Every second of every day, your heart performs an extraordinary balancing act. Roughly the size of your fist, this remarkable organ contracts about 100,000 times each day, pumping thousands of litres of blood through an intricate network of vessels. It does so with astonishing reliability, rarely taking a break from the moment it first begins beating before birth until the end of life. Most of us think about the heart in simple terms. We measure its rate, check our blood pressure, or perhaps hear about blocked arteries and heart attacks. Doctors often assess how much blood the heart pumps with each beat or calculate the familiar “ejection fraction,” which estimates how well the heart empties during contraction. These measurements are valuable, but they tell only part of the story. More

This Audio is based on the papers “Impact of Simulated Vascular Aging and Heart Rate on Myocardial Efficiency: A Tale of Two Paradigms from In Silico Modelling,” in Journal of Cardiovascular Development and Disease, https://doi.org/10.3390/jcdd12050163, and “Myocardial oxygen consumption, myocardial efficiency, and mechanical efficiency: A review across pathologic and physiologic states,” in Physiological Reports https://doi.org/10.14814/phy2.70890

For further information, please contact Prof. Lawrence J. Mulligan at mulligan-lawrence@cooperhealth.edu

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

What does this mean?

Share: You can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt: You can change, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Credit: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.