Understanding Your Heart

This Section is designed to help you understand your heart and its various parts and components that need to be operating in unison for it to be functioning appropriately. Understanding your heart and the various diseases associated with it should start with understanding your healthy heart. In following tutorial we can take you through the various components that make the heart function normally. Heart and Lungs

There are 4 large components of the heart: 1. The heart muscle 2. The valves of the heart, 3. The blood supply to the heart, 4. The electrical system of the heart. If any of these four components go wrong it can affect how your heart functions.

The Heart

The hollow center of your heart is divided into four sections, called chambers. Each chamber is like a separate room, with doors (valves) that let blood in and out.

Where Blood Flows In — The Atria Apex of the heart

The two upper chambers in your heart are called the atria. The atria are the receiving chambers of your heart. When blood flows into your heart from the body or lungs, it always flows into either the right or left atrium — never anywhere else. (One upper chamber is called an atrium. Both upper chambers together are called the atria.) Blood from the body goes to the right atrium, while the left atrium receives blood from the lungs, through structures called the pulmonary veins.