Human heart facts

This is a larger list of the most interesting facts about the human heart on the internet.

-Did you know that human heart beat 35 million times a year.

-Your system of blood vessels - arteries, veins and capillaries - is over 60.000 ( 96.000 km ) miles long. That's long enough to go around the world more than twice!

-The adult heart pumps about 5 quarts of blood each minute - approximately 2.000 ( 9120 liters ) gallons of blood each day - throughout the body.

-The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime - that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.

-When attempting to locate their heart, most people place their hand on their left chest. Actually, your heart is located in the center of your chest between your lungs. The bottom of the heart is tipped to the left, so you feel more of your heart on your left side of your chest.

-The heart beats about 100.000 times each day.

-In a 70-year lifetime, the average human heart beats more than 2.5 billion times.

-An adult woman's heart weighs about 8 ounces, a man's about 10 ounces.

-A child's heart is about the size of a clenched fist, an adult's heart is about the size of two fists.

-Blood is about 78 percent water.

-Blood takes about 20 seconds to Circulate throughout the entire vascular system.

-The structure of the heart was first described in 1706, by Raymond Viessens, a French anatomy professor.

-The Electrocardiograph (ECG) was invented in 1902 by Willem Einthoven Dutch Physiologist.
This test is still used to evaluate the heart's rate and rhythm.

-The first heart specialists emerged after World War I.

-The human heart weighs less than a pound.

-Most heart attacks occur between the hours of 8 and 9 AM.

-The human heart can create enough pressure that it could squirt blood at a distance of thirty feet.

-The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.

-Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles)-- that's four times the distance across the US from coast to coast.

-Every day 2.700 people die of heart disease.

-Feel your pulse by placing two fingers at pulse points on your neck or wrists. The pulse you feel is blood stopping and starting as it moves through your arteries. As a kid, your resting pulse might range from 90 to 120 beats per minute. As an adult, your pulse rate slows to an average of 72 beats per minute.

-Give a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze. You're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body. Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard--twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting.

-Oxygen-poor blood (shown in blue) flows from the body into the right atrium.

-Hold your hand out and make a fist. If you're a kid, your heart is about the same size as your fist, and if you're an adult, it's about the same.

-In 2006, 631,636 people died of heart disease. Heart disease caused 26% of deaths—more than one in every four—in the United States.

-Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women. Half of the deaths due to heart disease in 2006 were women.

-Coronary heart disease is the most common type of heart disease. In 2005, 445,687 people died from coronary heart disease.

-Every year about 785,000 Americans have a first heart attack. Another 470,000 who have already had one or more heart attacks have another attack.

-In 2010, heart disease will cost the United States $316.4 billion.3 This total includes the cost of health care services, medications, and lost productivity.

-Across the United States, death rates due to heart disease in 2006 were highest in Mississippi and lowest in Minnesota.

-In a 2005 survey, most respondents—92%—recognized chest pain as a symptom of a heart attack. Only 27% were aware of all major symptoms and knew to call 9-1-1 when someone was having a heart attack.4
About 47% of sudden cardiac deaths occur outside a hospital. This suggests that many people with heart disease don't act on early warning signs.

-In 2003, approximately 37% of adults reported having two or more of the risk factors listed above.