Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com, where smart Happens, brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, Visa prevents, detects, and resolves online fraud safe Secure Visa. 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 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. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.