PBS Special - The Mysterious Human Heart - Part 1of3 (2007.HDTV.SoS)

Originally aired: 2007.10.15



"The heart is the engine of human life. Beating almost 100,000 times a day, more than 36 million times each year, it endures abuse and trauma with extraordinary resilience. And yet, as more nations become prosperous and lifestyles change, heart disease has become the world's number one killer of men and women alike. In America alone, approximately 3,000 people a day die from cardiovascular disease. THE MYSTERIOUS HUMAN HEART is a new in-depth, comprehensive television series from award-winning filmmaker David Grubin about the heart: how it works, what can go wrong with it, and how we treat it. The three-hour series follows the true, compelling stories of men and women, young and old alike, whose hearts have led them to a brush with mortality. Through these encounters, the series will explore the most common misconceptions about this unique organ, and document the latest scientific and medical revelations - discoveries that have transformed our understanding of the heart and given us new insights into the best ways to prevent heart disease and treat it when it does occur.



Episode 1: Endlessly Beating



The normal heart is a muscle about the size of a fist. With every beat it drives three ounces of blood through its intricate chambers and around five quarts throughout the entire body. Though we know much about how it operates, the heart is, nonetheless, a miraculous organ that has baffled the generations of scientists who have tried to mechanically replicate its power and efficiency. Endlessly Beating examines the heart as a muscle - pumping almost 100,000 times a day, pushing approximately five quarts of blood in an endless course to deliver oxygen to every cell of the human body. This hour tells the story of the normal heart through the histories of three people with end-stage heart failure, where a pump may be a temporary remedy, but in the long term, a transplant is almost always necessary. The three patients profiled live on the edge of life, existing in a compromised state that will inevitably need drastic intervention. Of the three individuals this hour follows, one will eventually receive the life-saving gift of a transplant; another must depend on an experimental new device to stay alive until a new heart can be found; and the third recovers with the aid of a heart pump, which lets his once-failed heart return to normal."



more info: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/heart/
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Runtime: 54:17

Source: OTA High Definition 1080i

Encoding: xvid.720x400.1397kbps.mp3.160.vbr

File Size: 600MB



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