All About Cardiovascular System and Disorders

HLHS is short for hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe form of birth defect of heart. The left sided chambers of the heart are underdeveloped in HLHS.

Maximum heart rate predicted can be calculated with the formula 220 - age. For a 55 year old, this will come to 165 beats per minute.

M-mode echocardiography is time-motion echocardiography, a graphical representation of movements of structures of heart along a single scan line with time.

The waves in a normal ECG are the P wave, QRS complex and T wave.

Any of the four heart valves can get narrowed.

Purkinje fibres are the terminal portions of the conduction system of the heart.

Atrial fibrillation is an electrical disorder of the upper chambers of the heart in which they are activated in an irregular haphazard fashion at high rate.

Usual cause of thickening of the walls of the heart is an increase in the load which produces a compensatory increase in thickness to overcome added load.

Evaluation of prosthetic valves is one of the difficult tasks in echocardiography because of the dense shadows caused by prosthetic valves.

The sinus node is the normal pacemaker of heart which gives out regular electrical signals for the functioning of the heart in response to body's needs.