120 Over 80 Articles - Cardiovascular System

Cardiovascular System
What is it?

The cardiovascular system essentially consists of the heart, a network of hollow blood vessels (called arteries, veins and capillaries) and the blood that fills them.
Understanding how high blood pressure affects overall health makes it a good idea to at least understand how the mechanics of this marvelous system works.

In simplistic terms, the cardiovascular system conveys food and oxygen to every one of the 500 million million or so cells in the body, and dispatches waste products from the body’s cellular metabolism, to the appropriate organs for removal.

The Mechanics of it

The mechanical aspect of how blood is mobilised through the cardiovascular system may be likened to how gasoline is moved in the fuel system on your automobile.

The gasoline is stored in the tank at one end of the vehicle. The gasoline firstly has to be pumped by the fuel pump from the fuel tank via a large main pipe to the opposite end of the vehicle where the engine is located.
The fuel must also be pumped hard enough to defy gravity because the upper engine parts that require the fuel is located higher than the position of the fuel tank.
The fuel, which is still under pressure, then passes though filters which removes any impurities from it (if there were any). The main pipe is then branched into 4, 6, 8 or as many necessary smaller pipes that feed fuel to the upper parts of the engines that require it.
Fuel that is pumped in excess to the needs of the engine at any time is pumped back to the fuel tank by another system of small pipes connected to the pump, ready for another trip around this circuit.
If this mechanical arrangement did not exist fuel would simply sit in the fuel tank under no persuasion to move. The engine simply would not start due to fuel starvation.

The heart is to the cardiovascular system what the fuel pump is to the automobile; without the heart blood would never defy gravity and be pumped to the brain or the other organs; these organs would simply be starved of nutrients and die.
To continue the analogy, the arteries act as the pipe work that deliver fuel to the engine, and the cardiovascular's veins act as the pipe work that carries the fuel back to the fuel tank for another circulation.
To complete the analogy, the kidneys, lungs and liver performs as the fuel filters do in the fuel system i.e. they remove impurities from the blood.

How It Works

The heart keeps the blood flowing to all the organs and tissues in the body and has to pump hard enough to make blood defy gravity and travel upwards to the brain and through the tiny blood vessels.

First it pumps nourished blood from the heart into the central artery of the body, called the Aorta.
The Aorta branches into many smaller arteries and then into smaller arterioles that reach all peripherals of the body. These arterioles allow pressurised blood passage to even smaller blood vessels called capillaries, which allow blood to infiltrate tissues and cells for metabolism.
The capillaries allow waste from cellular metabolism to enter the tiny thread of blood they contain, and this blood is forced into the very small veins called venules.
The venules run into a network of progressively larger veins before entering main veins that lead directly to organs such as the kidneys and the lungs on route to the heart.

The force provided by the heart to keep the blood moving is what we call blood pressure. High blood pressure occurs when the force blood imparts on the walls of the blood vessels becomes excessive.

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