8 Major Heartbreakers

Your heart pumps billions of gallons of blood during your lifetime. But like any hardworking machine, sometimes things go awry.

By Doug Donaldson
Illustrated by Echo Medical Media

Hold a tennis ball in your fist. Imagine it’s your heart (it’s about the same size). Now squeeze the ball hard to mimic the contractions your heart performs to pump blood through your circulatory system 60 times every minute.

Repeat 100,000 times.

That’s how often your heart expands and contracts in just one day. Blood flows into the right atrium, then into the right ventricle, which sends blood to the lungs to add oxygen and purge waste. After a trip through the left atrium and the left ventricle, blood continues through the body to the liver and kidneys, where waste products are filtered. The ba-bum or lub-dub sounds are valves opening and closing to prevent circulatory backwash. Click here for a full description of how the heart works.

When everything’s working correctly, the heart is one powerful machine. Unfortunately, some ailments, genetic conditions, or too many doughnuts can throw a wrench into that finely tuned engine. Here, Christopher B. Granger, M.D., a cardiologist at Duke University School of Medicine, explains the most common ways hearts break, why they do, and how you can prevent it.