How do Heart Bypass operations work? - podcast episode cover

How do Heart Bypass operations work?

Sep 04, 20133 min
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Episode description

Since the heart is a muscle, it relies on the oxygen and nutrients contained in blood. This blood is supplied by arteries on the exterior of the heart -- when these arteries are blocked, a heart attack results. Listen to find out in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Your photos, music and documents are irreplaceable. Protect them with Mosey by e m C, the most trusted name and cloud Backup. Back up your files today and save ten percent with promo code. Brain Stuff at mosey dot com and moz Y dot com. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what is a heart bypass operation? Your heart is an amazing organ. It beats thousands of

times each day, every day for your entire life. In the process, it pumps about five million gallons of blood through your body. Since the heart is a muscle, it needs blood for the oxygen and nutrients it contains, but it can't use the blood it's pumping. Instead, there are arteries on the outside of the heart that provide the blood that the muscle needs. If one of the these

outer arteries gets clogged, it causes a heart attack. A blockage like this is normally caused by fatty deposits that build up in the hearts arteries over the course of many years. Everything you hear about fat in the diet, cholesterol, coronary artery disease, and clogged arteries is focused on this problem. It turns out that blocked heart arteries and the heart attacks they cause, are a leading killer in the United States.

When one of the hearts arteries gets blocked and a person has a heart attack, one common treatment is heart bypass surgery. They sew in a new piece of blood vessel to bridge over or bypass the blockage in an artery. In many cases, the surgeon will fix not only the immediate problem, but also other arteries on the heart that are starting to look blocked. If the surgeon repairs three of the arteries, it's called a triple bypass operation. If

four arteries are repaired, that's a quadruple bypass. The blood vessel used to create the bypass is taken from the chest or the leg. The body has several redundant vessels that are removed without doing any harm. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Protect your photos, music and documents and access them anywhere with Mosey by e m C the most trusted name and cloud backup and now save ten with

promo code brain stuff at mosey dot com. Get started today at m o z y dot com.

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