Cardiac Cycle Essay

The process of a drop of blood to go from the heart, to the body, and back to the heart is called the Cardiac Cycle. When the heart pumps blood throughout the body, there are a lot of factors that help it happen and influence how well it happens. It is a very quick cycle, occurring every .8 seconds, which means it happened about 70 times per minute. Systoles, diastoles, and blood pressure all are the main components of what make a cardiac cycle occur. In order for blood to move through our body it must be pushed, this is what the systoles do, they are the contractions the heart makes to push the blood through the veins and arteries. Every systole takes about .3 seconds, making it the faster of the two processes. There are two types of systoles that occur in our heart, the atrial systoles

Our arteries and veins are like hoses, they normally have a nice clean flow, but sometimes our blood pressure can be raised when bad things happen to them. Arteries can get clogged, and that happening is much like sticking your finger at the head of the hose to make the water squirt farther, the same amount of liquid has to get through but now with a smaller hole, so it has to go faster (Tamarkin Ph.D., 2011). Blood pressure is always faster right at the end of a ventricular systole, because the blood receives a large push from the contraction and that speeds up all of the blood in the body for a little bit. The blood pressure is also determined by how fast the heart has to beat to get the blood to the body, so higher blood pressure normally occurs when one is doing a lot of physical activity, is angry, or is under stress. The pulse we feel when we feel our wrist or neck is a surge of blood coming from our heart, so when our pulse is faster than that means our blood pressure has risen (Cordova, et al.,