Heart and Circulation Terms
The heart, arteries, veins, blood pressure, and circulation. Browse definitions and meanings below.
What is cardiology?
Cardiology is the branch of medicine dealing with the heart and the blood vessels serving it. A cardiologist treats problems of the pump itself, of the arteries feeding it, of the valves controlling flow through it, and of the electrical system setting its rhythm.
Those four elements account for most of the vocabulary. Terms built on cardio- and myo- describe the muscle, coronary terms the arteries supplying it, valvular terms the doors between chambers, and terms built on -cardia the rate: tachycardia too fast, bradycardia too slow.
Terms in this topic
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A drug that is used to lower blood pressure.
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A rare cancer that forms in the outer layer of tissue of the adrenal gland (a small organ on top of each kidney that makes steroid hormones, adrenaline, and noradrenaline to control heart rate…
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A rare cancer of the adrenal gland's outer layer that often announces itself through the hormones it releases unchecked.
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A drug used to treat certain types of abnormal heart rhythms that have not gotten better with other drugs.
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A drug that is used to lower blood pressure.
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A procedure in which a tube is inserted into the chest to view the tissues and organs in the area between the lungs and between the breastbone and heart.
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Nearly every artery in the body branches from this one vessel, whose elastic wall keeps blood moving between heartbeats.
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Surgery in which a healthy blood vessel taken from another part of the body is used to make a new path for blood around a blocked artery leading to the heart.
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The blocking of an artery by a clot of foreign material.
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An artery is a blood vessel that carries oxygen rich blood away from the heart toward the body's tissues and organs.
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An electronic device that is implanted in the body to monitor heart rate and rhythm.
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A raised result announces that cells somewhere have been damaged without saying which cells, which is why it is never read alone.
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The sudden events, heart attack and most strokes, come less from slow narrowing than from a plaque tearing open and triggering a clot.
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Most of the fall in blood cholesterol comes not from making less but from the liver clearing more of it out of the circulation.
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Two opposing divisions, one for action and one for rest, keep heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion balanced without any conscious effort.
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Biofeedback trains awareness of involuntary body functions using real time sensor data, applied alongside other care for conditions such as headache and chronic pain.
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Pressure is never a fixed number, moving through the day with activity, sleep, posture and stress, which is why single readings mislead.
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A radioactive substance that is given through a vein, and collects in bone cells and in tumor cells that have spread to the bone.
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A procedure in which a small amount of C-11 choline (a radioactive form of the vitamin choline) is injected into a vein.
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CAB most often abbreviates a coronary artery bypass, surgery that reroutes blood around a blocked heart vessel, though the same letters also denote a community advisory board.