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A question to do with heart and its health

Hello everyone.

I am not studying at university, I am in high school and I don't even study anything to do with medicine.

I study electronics, it's my hobby and I spend a lot of time doing it. Every time looking for new challenges, new ideas, innovation, invention. I've ever loved repairing things, turning them alive again, and not only machines and electronic devices, I like to make anything work correctly again.

That's why I am pretty interested in medicine, actually I have very interesting ideas of projects I will gradually do related to it, you may have seen that many measurement devices are electrical.

A project I am working in is a really innovative one and it works directly with and in the veins.

I wonder, because I don't really know much about the cardiovascular system, would it be a problem to cut a vein and to replace it with another material (with proper qualities to avoid cholesterol problems when it gets stuck)?

Does heart suffer overload (be forced) when you try to move anything with its force? Cholesterol would be an example. The heart would try to move the blood and it needs a higher effort, but what's the limit? A little bit of effort shouldn't be bad (as everyone has at least a little bit of stuck cholesterol), am I right?


I would be thankful if you could give me an idea using your knowledges.

Hope you understand what I say, just ask me if did not.
(edited 9 years ago)
Original post by BrunoARG
Hello everyone.

I am not studying at university, I am in high school and I don't even study anything to do with medicine.

I study electronics, it's my hobby and I spend a lot of time doing it. Every time looking for new challenges, new ideas, innovation, invention. I've ever loved repairing things, turning them alive again, and not only machines and electronic devices, I like to make anything work correctly again.

That's why I am pretty interested in medicine, actually I have very interesting ideas of projects I will gradually do related to it, you may have seen that many measurement devices are electrical.

A project I am working in is a really innovative one and it works directly with and in the veins.

I wonder, because I don't really know much about the cardiovascular system, would it be a problem to cut a vein and to replace it with another material (with proper qualities to avoid cholesterol problems when it gets stuck)?

Does heart suffer overload (be forced) when you try to move anything with its force? Cholesterol would be an example. The heart would try to move the blood and it needs a higher effort, but what's the limit? A little bit of effort shouldn't be bad (as everyone has at least a little bit of stuck cholesterol), am I right?


I would be thankful if you could give me an idea using your knowledges.

Hope you understand what I say, just ask me if did not.


First, just to clear things up, veins aren't really affected by the 'build up of cholesterol' in the walls that you talk of. This is much more prominent in arteries. Arteries take blood from the heart to the organs, and veins return blood from the organs to the heart. Arteries carry blood under a very high pressure, and so contribute to the resistance against blood flow, whereas this is minimal in veins. Veins also store a lot of blood I.e. High capacitance.

Now, when cholesterol builds up within the walls, this has two consequences. Narrowing of the diameter of the vessel and hardening of the walls (they're normally quite elastic). This process is called atherosclerosis btw, in case you want to look it up. This means the resistance to blood flow in the arteries increases, which leads to increased pressure of the blood (high blood pressure/hypertension) and an increased force that must be generated by the heart to maintain flow (called afterload). This can lead to compensatory thickening of the heart muscle (ventricular Hypertrophy).

You're right that fatty deposits start to build up at around age 10 in everybody. At low levels, these don't really have a significant impact on the blood vessel integrity.


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(edited 8 years ago)

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