Did you know…
♥ Your circulatory system of blood vessels — arteries, veins and capillaries — is over 60,000 miles long. That’s long enough to go around the world more than twice!
♥ The adult heart pumps about 5 quarts of blood each minute throughout the body. That’s about 2,000 gallons of blood each day.
♥ The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime.
♥ The heart beats about 100,000 times each day.
♥ By age 70, the average human heart beats more than 2.5 billion times.
♥ Blood takes about 20 seconds to circulate throughout the entire vascular system from the time it leaves the heart to the time it returns.
♥ Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard — twice as hard as the leg muscles work when a person is sprinting.
♥ The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand, can be so small that it takes 10 of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
Sources:
Your Heart and Blood Vessels – Heart Facts. (Cleveland Clinic Miller Family Heart & Vascular Institute) www.my.clevelandclinic.org/heart/heartworks/heartfacts.aspx
Amazing Heart Facts (Nova Online) www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/eheart/facts.html