Reflection

Dr Natasha Barrett reflects on how we have learnt about how a healthy heart and circulatory system works, so that we may understand more in the coming weeks about what happens when it is diseased.

Next week

Next week you’ll start to look at some of the problems that occur in the cardiovascular system and blood clotting processes such as haemostasis and thrombosis. You’ll also have the option to try a home practical investigating the effects of thrombosis using jelly and balloons.

Further resources

Throughout this course we provide links to resources and websites that contain valuable supplementary information. You may like to discover more about this week’s topics by following the links below, and feel free to share your own links with others in the comments.

Suitable for beginners

You can carry out further self-study by reading the chapter(s) on the cardiovascular system in any physiology text book.

You can explore specific cardiovascular diseases on several recommended websites:

• British Heart Foundation website
• Heart Research UK
• Patient.co.uk
• Heart rate life expectancy model
• Heart blood volume

Suitable for more experienced learners

• Pubmed – Once you have searched for your chosen terms and obtained a list of possible articles, try selecting “free full text” under “Text availability” in the left hand menu to display articles that you will be able to access for free.

There are many journal articles freely available due to the public funding that led to the research. We advise against paying for articles to read for this course. If you find any great articles, do share this with others by posting a brief summary of the paper, a comment on the reliability of the paper along with the reference and a link to the paper if possible.