29 September 2020
The ol’ ticker is a busy little beast, beating around 100,000 times during the day and pumping 2,000 gallons of blood through the average human body.
That’s a whopping workload for an organ that weighs between eight to 10 ounces. In fact, the heart, which is a muscle, has twice the power of the leg muscles of someone who is sprinting.
The blood your heart pumps travels about 12,000 miles (19,300km) through your body each day, according to UnityPoint Health, which is four times the size of the US from coast to coast. During your lifetime, you pump about one million barrels of blood.
Today is World Heart Day, a day designated by the World Heart Federation (WHF) to promoting good heart health and the importance of reducing the risk of the biggest human killer on the planet, cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Around 17.9 million people worldwide die from CVD each year, says the WHF. By controlling factors such as smoking, unhealthy diets and physical inactivity, at least 80 per cent of deaths from stroke or heart disease could be avoided.
During the COVID-19 pandemic looking after your heart is especially important as a dodgy ticker makes you more vulnerable to the coronavirus.
The WHF reports a worrying trend that heart patients, who would normally seek routine care or need to access emergency services for non-COVID related issues, were avoiding hospitals and doctors. Across the board, countries noted this dramatic drop, attributing it to fear of contracting the virus.
For people with underlying health conditions such as heart disease, the WHF’s message is that your hospital, ED, or doctor’s surgery is safe and if you need to go, you should.
The Federation says the risk of heart attacks and stroke far outweighs the risks of contracting COVID-19 and time is truly of the essence when heart trouble hits.
The WHF has produced lots of resources to spread the word on CVD and COVID-19, including prevention, transmission and vulnerability. You can find some of these on the
World Heart Day website.
Other resources can be found on
WHF website.