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Speaker 1: Brain with today's question. What is a heart bypass operation?
Speaker 1: Your heart is an amazing organ. It beats thousands of
Speaker 1: times each day, every day for your entire life. In
Speaker 1: the process, it pumps about five million gallons of blood
Speaker 1: through your body. Since the heart is a muscle, it
Speaker 1: needs blood for the oxygen and nutrients it contains, but
Speaker 1: it can't use the blood it's pumping. Instead, there are
Speaker 1: arteries on the outside of the heart that provide the
Speaker 1: blood that the muscle needs. If one of these outer
Speaker 1: arteries gets clogged, it causes a heart attack. A blockage
Speaker 1: like this is normally caused by fatty deposits that build
Speaker 1: up in the hearts arteries over the course of many years.
Speaker 1: Everything you hear about fat in the diet, cholesterol, coronary
Speaker 1: artery disease, and clogged arteries is focused on this problem.
Speaker 1: It turns out that blocked heart arteries and the heart
Speaker 1: attacks they cause are a leading killer in the United States.
Speaker 1: When one of the hearts arteries gets blocked and a
Speaker 1: person has a heart attack, one common treatment is heart
Speaker 1: bypass surgery. They sew in a new piece of blood
Speaker 1: vessel to bridge over or bypass the blockage in an artery.
Speaker 1: In many cases, the surgeon will fix not only the
Speaker 1: immediate problem, but also other arteries on the heart that
Speaker 1: are starting to look blocked. If the surgeon repairs three
Speaker 1: of the arteries, it's called a triple bypass operation. If
Speaker 1: four arteries are repaired, that's a quadruple bypass. The blood
Speaker 1: vessel used to create the bypass is taken from the
Speaker 1: chest or the leg. The body has several redundant vessels
Speaker 1: that are removed without doing any harm. Do you have
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