Supplying the heart with sugar and oxygen is the job of the coronary arteries shown here. These arteries obtain blood from the aorta. If they get blocked, the heart screams "angina" and its muscle cells can be injured and then die. This so-called ischemia (defined) produces the pain of angina.

Computer generated heart image © Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland.

Patients also feel a general sense of fatigue as their bodies lose the nourishment and oxygen blood is supposed to provide.

You can see a blockage on this view of a heart, derived from a CT scan of a cadaver (dead body). It turns out that blockages are often very local -- which is handy indeed, since bypass surgery simply bypasses that blockage, and hooks into arteries further downstream.

This is how a healthy heart sounds. And now for some interesting statistics on heart surgery.

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