Left Ventricle - Function

Function

For excellence of health, the left ventricular muscle must:

  • (a) relax very rapidly after each contraction so as to fill rapidly with oxygenated blood flowing from the lung veins, i.e. diastolic relaxation and filling.
  • (b) contract rapidly and forcibly to force the majority of this blood into the aorta, overcoming the much higher aortic pressure and the extra pressure required to stretch the aorta and other major arteries enough to expand and make room for the sudden increase in blood volume, i.e. systolic contraction and ejection.
  • (c) be able to rapidly increase or decrease its pumping capacity under nervous system control.

Read more about this topic:  Left Ventricle

Famous quotes containing the word function:

    The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.
    Erich Fromm (1900–1980)

    My function in life is not to be a politician in Parliament: it is to get something done.
    Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)

    Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.
    Robert Warshow (1917–1955)