Reflection

Dr Natasha Barrett reflects on what we have learnt this week about heart failure, hypertension, valvular disease and arrhythmias. Let us know what you think of this week. Have you been surprised by anything that you’ve learnt? Has anything you’ve learnt changed your opinions or influenced your lifestyle?

Share your thoughts in the discussion below. Take some time to read and respond to, or ‘Like’ posts by other learners.

Next week

Having learnt about what a healthy heart and a diseased heart is, in the final week you’ll take a look at the various factors that affect heart health, such as age, genes and cholesterol. you’ll also investigate the benefits of a well balanced diet and physical activity for maintaining a healthy heart and look at how your food and activity diary can be used to keep track and understand patterns in your own life.

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 cardiovascular diseases in any pathophysiology textbook.

You can explore specific cardiovascular diseases on several recommended websites:

• British Heart Foundation
• Heart Research UK
• Patient.co.uk
• Merck Manuals
• US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Arrhythmia Alliance
• Heart Failure Online
• Heart Failure Matters

You can find UK based training courses for first aid and use of defibrillators from a variety of providers including:

• St John’s Ambulance
• British Red Cross

If you live outside the UK, please share links to any organisations that offer first aid training in your country in the comments.

Suitable for more experienced learners

PubMed – Once you have put in your search terms and obtained a list of possible articles, try selecting “free full text” from the left hand menu to display articles that you will be able to access.

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.