Heart Sound Recorder Event

Heart Sound Recorder

The heart beats 100,000 times per day, 35 million times per day. The heart pumps 5 quarts of blood each minute, around 2000 gallons per day. When all is going well, blood takes about 20 seconds to circulate through the entire vascular system. The heart never rests and its rate, rhythm and tone depend on input from the nervous system and the efficiency of cellular metabolism. Measuring the heart’s sounds allows us to diagnose problems with the heart valves, heart muscle, and the electrical system of the heart. The heart produces the master pulse of the body.

The statistical breakdown of heart issues is:

• 80% of heart issues are valvular
• 10% are muscular
• 6% are nervous system related / electrical
• 4% are coronary artery disease

This is clinically significant because most medical professionals that monitor the heart look at electrical activity via an EKG, which can tell us if the heart is damaged. More invasive procedures like angiograms (a CT scan with contrast dye injected into the blood) or cardiac catheterization (feeding a camera into the heart through the underarm or femoral artery) can tell us if there is occlusion in a coronary vessel. Echocardiograph (an ultrasound image of the heart) can provide us with a real time image of how efficient the heart muscle is pumping and if there is any valvular insufficiency.

The heart sound recorder is a very sensitive microphone that picks up on the sounds the heart is making and displays this information as amplitude of sound across time.  By doing this, we are assessing the valvular and muscular efficiency of the heart muscle, and we can infer how well the electrical conductivity in the heart is working. One of the great things about this tool is that clinicians have figured out that there are specific patterns of heart sounds that correlate with nutritional deficiencies.  Supporting the overall metabolism of the body by giving it what it needs nutritionally, we can see in real time how the efficiency of the heart is affected.

While the heart sound recorder is not a replacement for conventional cardiology, it gives us real time, measurable, and clinically actionable information about the most common issues that happen with the heart.  This makes it an ideal screening tool in primary care practice.

What we can tell at a glance with the heart sound recorder:

• Whether there is any degeneration of the heart muscle itself
• Electrical conductivity problems in the heart
• Connective tissue problems, manifesting as insufficient heart valve function
• How the tone of the autonomic nervous system is affecting the heart (aka how stress is affecting the heart)
• What the cause of a fast heart rate is
• Which nutrients the cardiovascular system needs