hi everybody dr mike here in this video we're going to take a look at the role of the cardiac system [Music] first important point is that the heart is a specialized type of muscle and like all muscle it contracts to generate some sort of force now the force that the heart generates is a force that pushes or ejects blood out to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the tissues of the body we call this a pressure and we often measure this pressure in millimeters of mercury now when the heart contracts to eject this blood the term
we use is systole so systole let's write that up systole is the contraction of the heart to eject that blood then after a contraction the heart needs to relax and fill up with blood and this is what we call diastole so diastole is the relaxation or filling of the heart now the heart itself is located in our chest it's a little bit bigger than the size of our fist and it sits a little bit towards the left of the sternum the middle portion of our chest it's also tilted a little bit so that the pointy
bottom of the heart that we term the apex is actually pointing towards our left hip that's probably an important point to highlight so the apex is pointing towards the left hip now this apex is sitting at around about the space between the fourth and fifth rib what we call the fourth intercostal space fourth intercostal space now the top of the heart strangely enough is called the base and so the base of the heart sits at around about the third rib and this is a very quick run through to some of the most important roles of
the heart
