Heart and Circulation Terms

The word failure misleads, since the heart keeps beating; what fails is the match between its output and what the body needs.

Among the most effective rhythm drugs available and among the most toxic, because it lodges in the tissues for months.

A beta blocker that also relaxes blood vessels, used to steady a failing heart rather than simply to slow the pulse.

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.

Narrowing causes symptoms during exertion, but it is a plaque that suddenly ruptures which causes most heart attacks.

Narrowed heart arteries starve the muscle of blood, causing chest pain on effort and, when one blocks, a heart attack.

The smell of new-mown hay and tonka beans, and the plant chemical that mold converted into the first true blood thinner.

Breathing runs automatically because this muscle answers a signal from the phrenic nerves, which arise high in the neck.

A garden flower that became a heart drug, still in use after two centuries, with a famously narrow margin for error.

A type of advance directive in which a person states that healthcare providers should not perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (restarting the heart) if his or her heart or breathing stops.

A type of advance directive in which a person states that healthcare providers should not perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (restarting the heart) if his or her heart or breathing stops.

One receptor sits in two very different places, which is how a single tablet ended up treating both blood pressure and prostate symptoms.

A drug used to treat high blood pressure and urinary problems caused by an enlarged prostate.

The leg symptoms are not the real danger; the danger is the fragment that breaks away and lodges in the lungs.

A two-in-one water pill, pairing a diuretic that wastes potassium with one that conserves it.

Ten electrodes produce twelve views of the same heartbeat, each looking at the heart from a different direction.

The number most often quoted from the study is ejection fraction, the share of blood the left ventricle pushes out with each beat.

Quick, painless and available almost anywhere, it is usually the first test reached for when the heart is the question.

A recording of the heart’s electrical activity from electrodes on the skin.

An embolism is a sudden blockage of a blood vessel by material that traveled there from elsewhere in the bloodstream.