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8 incredible heart facts you haven’t heard before

Did you know your heart beats about 100,000 times a day? And that's just the start.

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The heart is like a Timex watch: it takes a beating and keeps on ticking. It’s the human body’s workhorse, always on and playing a vital role in keeping you alive. The way the heart works is easy to grasp—it’s a pump, drawing blood in and sending it out.

But that’s the super simplified version of how the heart functions. Here are eight amazing facts about the heart thatShow More

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Your heart beats 100,000 times per day

Yes, you read that right. Your heart beats about 100,000 times per day. Since the average US life expectancy is currently almost 79 years, that means in the average lifetime a heart will thump about 2.9 billion times. The average man has about 12 pints of blood in his body, while the average woman has about 9.

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Your heart needs electricity to beat

For one heartbeat to occur, a group of cells called the sinoatrial node—located in one of the upper chambers of the heart—generates an electrical charge that travels through the heart and makes it contract. The upper chambers, called the atria, contract first and squeeze blood into the lowerShow More

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Your blood vessels stretch for miles and miles

All that blood has to go somewhere. Once the heart squeezes out the blood, the blood travels through the body’s network of blood vessels. Arteries carry oxygenated blood away from the heart and into the body. Veins bring blood depleted of oxygen back to the heart. Capillaries connect the two.

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Veins and valves fight gravity

The heart pumps blood out through all those miles of arteries, but once blood gets all the way from your heart down to your feet, how does it get back up? “The heart really has no effect coming back up,” says Layher. Instead, blood fights gravity through motion. “When we use the muscles in our legs,Show More

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Your heart is not on the left

Well, most of the heart is not normally on the left, we should say. Most of the heart is in the center of your chest. “The apex, or tip, of the heart sits just beneath the left breast area. That’s where you’d feel the maximum pulse,” says Layher. That may be why people put their hand over theirShow More

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Your heart hardly ever gets cancer

The heart can get tumors, and while many are benign—meaning they’re not cancerous and won’t spread to other parts of the body—they can still cause problems.

“They can be dangerous because they take up space in the heart and can block blood flow and interfere with the heart’s function,” according toShow More

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There are limits to the heart’s resiliency

“One of the things that’s amazing to me is the heart’s durability,” says Layher. “For the heart to beat and the valves to open and close so much and to not have parts wear out prematurely for most people, that’s pretty amazing.”

However, there are some things the heart just can’t bounce back from.Show More

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Your education level is associated with your risk of heart disease

An August 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that the less education someone has, the more likely he or she is to develop heart disease. Men between the ages of 45 and 85 who attended graduate school had a 42 percent chance of developing heart disease, while men with only aShow More

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