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The heart is not an breathless pump: it’s a existing, dynamic community of millions of hardworking cells. Its task is to deliver blood to organs that would die without it. Blood contains oxygen and nutrients necessary for the functioning of every cell in the body, admitting heart cells.

All people heart beats around 70 times per minute, or 100,000 times per day, or about 2.5 billion times in the average lifetime. This vitals is programmed to work mechanically for every second of every day for as long as you live, no matter what else you’re doing mentally or physically. Put differently, your heart never rests.

Your heart is settled just about in the center of your chest and is divided into four chambers: The two smaller upper chambers are known as the left atrium and right atrium and the two larger lower chambers are the left ventricle and right ventricle. Oxygen-poor blood enters the right atrium and is then pumped into the right ventricle and through the pulmonary artery to the lungs, where it is enriched with oxygen (and loses carbon dioxide).

The oxygenated blood is then acquitted to the left atrium via the pulmonary veins, from where it enters the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber of the heart. It is the thick, powerful muscle of the left ventricle that pumps blood to all the organs of the body via the aorta. From a cardiologist’s point of view, it is the left ventricle that is the most significant chamber because it is the area of the heart most likely to be affected by a heart attack .

For blood enters the aorta, some is immediately directed to the coronary arteries . The left principal coronary artery divides into two major coronary arteries – the left circumflex artery (LCx) and the left anterior descending artery (LAD). A third major artery, the right coronary artery (RCA), has its own point of origin from the aorta. All of these arteries have branches, which are also known as coronary arteries. They supply the beating heart muscle with blood and oxygen. Whenever anything obstructs the flow of blood through one of these arteries for more than 20 to 30 minutes, the heart will likely not receive enough oxygen, and the part of the heart muscle fed by that artery will die. This is what happens when you have a heart attack.

Heart failure occurs when your heart muscle is damaged to the point that your heart can no longer pump sufficient blood to the rest of your organs. When your heart is damaged and can no longer pump expeditiously, blood also tends to back up into the lungs, establishing them heavier, which results in difficulty breathing.