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Health and medicine
Course: Health and medicine > Unit 2
Lesson 9: Pressure volume loops- Pressure in the left heart - part 1
- Pressure in the left heart - part 2
- Pressure in the left heart - part 3
- Left ventricular pressure vs. time
- Left ventricular volume vs. time
- Drawing a pressure-volume loop
- Understanding the pressure-volume loop
- End diastolic pressure-volume relationship (EDPVR)
- End systolic pressure-volume relationship (ESPVR)
- Reimagine the pressure volume relationship
- What is preload?
- Why doesn't the heart rip?
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End diastolic pressure-volume relationship (EDPVR)
Find out what happens when the left ventricle is not allowed to contract, and instead you simply add and take away blood from it. Rishi is a pediatric infectious disease physician and works at Khan Academy. Created by Rishi Desai.
Want to join the conversation?
- If the atmospheric pressure is 760 mmHg, how is our heart only 120 mmHg during systole? I would imagine that a closed bag of air (atmosphere) would have less pressure than a closed bag being contracted without air being let out (LV). To me, the 2 numbers seem disproportionate, could someone please explain? Thx. :D(2 votes)
- Blood pressure is what is called a gauge pressure. Meaning it is taken in relation to a set zero value, that is not actually equal to zero, rather it is a number we measure and say is zero. In this case it is atmospheric pressure, which is 760mmHg ASL. Now, at sea level (ASL) there is 760mmHg of pressure on everything, thus any movement must first over come this pressure and BP (blood pressure) is no different. This means that 120mmHg is a gauge pressure and it can be translated from gauge pressure to an absolute pressure simply by adding 120 and the absolute pressure it must first overcome in-order to move. So at sea level, BP is 120 plus the 760 it must overcome and this gives us 880 mmHg.
We ignore the absolute pressure because it is a constant that affects everything equally and will throw-off calculations and ratios because it can make things look more similar than they actually are if it is larger, (basically it is a constant that is too large). When we look for cause and effect we need to look at how things are different, many times in isolation from how they are the same. The diff in 880 and 900 of a patient's BP gives us a .97 ratio of normal, but if we remove the constant pressure, we get 120 and 140, which yields a ratio of .85. The first ratio of .97 implies the pt has an insignificant deviation from normal (3%) due to randomness or other small deviations, and the second ratio shows a deviation of 15% from what is considered normal. This deviation is clearly significant and warrants investigation and can only be appreciated if we look at how things are different in isolation of constants.
Hope this helps!(2 votes)
- Is this diastolic pressure true?(1 vote)
- I believe you are questioning why ventricular end diastolic pressure seems very low, relative to diastolic pressure values for typical blood pressure. This is because at the end of systole, when ventricular contraction ends and the ventricle relaxes, left ventricular pressure drops below that of the pressure in the aorta, and blood begins to backflow from aorta to L ventricle. However, this backflow causes the aortic valve to be pushed shut, thus no longer allowing the pressure in the aorta to be transferred to the ventricle - the blood in the aorta is discontinuous from the blood in the ventricles once the aortic valves close. Arterial diastolic pressure is normally maintained at around 70-80 mmHg due to the elasticity of the arterial vessel walls pushing inward, however it is normal for the pressure in the ventricle to drop to 0-10 mmHg. So, short answer is yes, those diastolic values are normal.(3 votes)
- Is pressure and volume in the left ventricle a indirect relationship (one goes up the other goes down) or direct one goes up the other goes up (direct)?(1 vote)
- I would say it is not direct. However, it is not an inverse relalationship. If volume increases, pressure increases, but a direct relationship implies a linear relationship, which it is not. The greater the initial volume of blood, the greater the pressure increase for a given amount of blood entering the ventricle. For example, the pressure increase from a volume increase from 70 to 80 mL would be less than that from a a change from 90 to 100 mL(2 votes)
- How do you measure something like this clinically?(1 vote)
- Anything related to heart means pressure and volume is directly proportional? Is it bcz of this compliance property? Compliance is only seen in arteries? Anticipating reply .thank u.(1 vote)
- He says several time that it is a line. Well it is not a line. It is an exponential function right? I mean more volume, even more pressure than the last time volume went up and the inverse for less volume means that pressure and volume, assuming something is in a constant state(that is relaxed or contracted) are exponentially related and so the elastance is never really a line even though the systolic and arterial get really close to linear right?(1 vote)
- It looks like an exponential function the way he drew it but it is not. He drew x/y or p/v not x^2 or p^2 or v^2. It is a linear relationship not an exponential one.(1 vote)
- Hi! Is the end diastolic volume, the volume of both ventricles? And is the heart debiet the volume that the both ventricles pump into our body or just the left ventricle? Thanks!(1 vote)
- How do you calculate the time of the contraction of the ventricle? If you only know the heart debiet, edv? Is the time of the contraction always the same and is it just the frequency that will speed up the hole proces-> same time ventricle contract but more contractions that follow? Thanks a lot to answer!(1 vote)
- Effect on end diastolic pressure of diastolic failure??(1 vote)
Video transcript
Let me draw the pressure volume. I'm going just start
out something like this. And it's really easy to try
to draw a pressure volume loop from scratch. That's one of the reasons
I love about it-- one of the things I love
about it, rather. You've got pressure
on this side. And we're going to do it in
millimeters of mercury, which is pretty typical for us, right? We've got 0 to 100, and let's
just make this 120 up here. And this can be 50. And on the volume side, let's
make this 100 over here. That makes this about 50. And I'll make this
about 125, right? And I'd like to
start out with kind of low pressure and high volume. You can start out anywhere
in the loop really, right? But I just like to always start
out right here with a blue dot. And that's the point where the
left ventricle specifically in the heart is full of blood. And it's going to
start squeezing, right? It's going to start contracting. So pressure is going
to go straight up. And it's going to
keep rising, rising, rising to about let's say here. And I hope that was
a straight line. It's around 80 or so. And then the blood starts
getting into the aorta, right? Because the aortic valve
flips open at that point. And so it starts losing volume
because the blood volume is actually heading into the aorta. And then the volume
continues to fall and the pressure begins to fall. And so it looks
something like that. And that blue line that I drew
so far, that is systole, right? That's systole. So that's the part where the
heart muscle is contracting. And then you have the next part
of the pressure volume loop where now you have relaxation. So you have a fall in pressure
to about there, right? And then you have a
continued decrease, right? It continues to go down,
let's say to about there. And this is now where blood is
entering the left ventricle, which is why I'm showing
it going up in volume. And you finish your loop
something like that. So this is your
pressure volume loop. Now, I'm going to zoom in on
let's say a heart cell just to kind of point out what's
going on at the heart cell level. And remember heart cells
are often branched, so I'm just going
to draw it that way. And let's show some
actin and myosin. Of course, I'm kind
of exaggerating what it looks like just
to kind of make the point. But you might have
something like this, right? Lots of actin and myosin
inside of these cells. And remember, these
cells-- now, I'm just kind of reviewing with
you-- have a nucleus here, maybe a second nucleus there. But they're full of
actin and myosin. It doesn't look exactly
the way I drew it, but I just want to
remind you that there is a lot of protein
inside those cells. And the thing that these
cells are waiting for is calcium, right? The moment calcium enters these
cells, then they can contract. And if they contract,
then you basically have this part occurring, and in
fact, also this part occurring, right? This is all contraction. So all this contraction
is happening with the assumption that
calcium is coming inside of those cells. So what if I decide to
play a little trick, and I, basically, somehow I
vacuum up all the calcium, and I don't let that
calcium enter the cell? Well, what would happen? Well, you might have a loop. But the moment I
start doing this, then you don't really
have contraction anymore. So all of a sudden
at this point-- I'm going to just
kind of erase it-- you don't allow any
more contraction, so you wouldn't have this
sharp increase in pressure. In fact, you wouldn't
have any of this, right? If I could actually
vacuum up all the calcium, you wouldn't have any of that
systole really happening. You'd be basically kind
of stuck in diastole. So you'd basically
be stuck here, right? And this is--
remember this point we used to call end diastolic. So when you get to that
end diastolic point, instead you'd be basically
kind of stuck in limbo, right? Now, what if I took it one
step further, and I said, well-- I'm just going to
make a little space here by erasing all of this-- what
if I now draw for you the heart? Let's draw the left
ventricle out like that. And I'm not going to draw
the left atrium, just the left ventricle. And I'm going to fill
it in to look something like this, right? So you've got lots
of blood inside of that chamber of
the heart, right? It's full of blood. And let's say, now
that it's full of blood and it's not contracting,
I've got to do something with the left
ventricle, and I decide to kind of continue
my experiment. And I say, OK, I'm going
to take an injection, and I'm going to inject this
left ventricle full of blood. I'm going to put more blood
into the left ventricle. I'm going to put more blood in. You might be thinking,
well, how in the world do you put more blood into
something that is full? If it's full, it's full, right? So how can you
put more blood in? Well, think of it
like a balloon. You can have a full balloon,
but if you put enough pressure, you can actually increase
the volume, right? So in this case, it
will take pressure. And you know I'm not
going to candy coat this, this will take work. But if you're
willing to do it, you could actually put more
blood into a full ventricle. So let's extend this out. Let's say I put some extra
volume in, right, like that. Well, my pressure will
go up a little bit, and my curve will
look like this. Let's say I extend this out,
it'll start looking like that. And I could actually
do it again. I could put more
volume in there. And this time it took, actually,
a little bit more effort because it's getting harder and
harder, not unlike a balloon, right-- looking like that. And I could do it again. I could say, well, let
me try one more time. And now it's getting even
harder, right-- even harder to do this. So my curve is kind of
looking a little bit more like this, more steep
as time goes on. So on the one hand,
I'm adding more volume. That's what all these v's are. But as I do that, the
pressure's going up. That's what these p's are. So pressure and volume are,
of course, related, right? And we could do the reverse. I could actually flip it
around, and say, well, hold on a second. Instead of adding blood, what
if I decide to take blood away? What if I want to do something
like this where I actually pull blood away
off of the heart, suck it back, and take it, and
maybe throw it down the sink? Then what would happen? Well, let's say I start at
the same end diastolic point, just to kind of make
it nice and clear. Well, if I was to do that,
if I was to take blood away, then my volume, of
course, would go down. And if the volume goes down,
the pressure goes down. And I could do it again. I could take more volume way,
and the pressure would go down. And actually, it would
look pretty much the same as that chunk of our
pressure volume loop. So you can actually
see now, when we have our pressure volume
loop, that's actually kind of showing
you what it would look like to fill up the heart. And it makes perfect
sense, right? As you change the
volume, of course the pressure will
fall a little bit. If you take more volume
away, the pressure will fall even more. But what if I kept doing it? What if I just
kept extending this out and taking more volume off? Well, the pressure would
go down a little bit. And I could do it again. I could take even
more volume off, and I could end up with
really no blood in my chamber. And I would have, of course,
no pressure at that point. So you can actually
connect these lines. You could say, OK,
well, this is kind of what the curve might
look like, right-- something like that. And of course, I would have
to erase this little chunk because that was not related
to passive filling, right? That was, remember, where
the left ventricle was still relaxing. And I could also just
erase all this stuff to make our line more
clear and easy to see. And so now what you see emerging
is a fantastic relationship, right-- a pressure-volume
relationship. And this pressure-volume
relationship is assuming that
the left ventricle muscles are relaxed, right? This is assuming that there's
no contraction happening. So remember my first
assumption, which was around getting
rid of that calcium. If you can really fully
relax these cells, if they're relaxed, and
then you kind of passively fill them up with blood
or take blood away like I've done with my
injection, my needle, then you develop this
interesting pressure-volume curve. So this is a pressure-volume
relationship. And you might actually see all
of this kind of shortened down. Sometimes people don't
have the time to say, well, it's the end diastolic
pressure-volume relationship. That's five long words, so
instead they might just say, well, this is your EDPVR. You might see that-- EDPVR. And one final point I
want to leave you with is, remember, anytime you see
pressure divided by volume, that's really a slope
of a line, right? So this could be the slope
of the line right there. Or you could have the slope
of the line right there. So anytime you have p over
v, that's just a slope. And that slope
equals the elastance. Remember the concept
of elastance? Elastance is just the
slope of the line. So if you ever want to
think about it differently, you could say, well, really the
end diastolic pressure-volume relationship line
is also telling you a little bit about the elastance
of the left ventricle when it's relaxed. So I'll leave you
there, and you can think about this a little
bit more on your own.