What is open heart surgery and a bypass operation?

★ wanayoo — archive 1999 http://howstuffworks.com/question120.htm

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Question

What does it mean when someone has a heart bypass operation? For example, Johnny Carson recently had a "quadruple bypass"? What does that mean?

Answer

The heart is an amazing organ. It beats thousands of times each day, every day, for your entire life. In the process it pumps about 5 million gallons of blood through your body!

The heart is a muscle, and it needs a supply of oxygen-rich blood to survive. Even though the heart has all of that blood flowing through it while it is pumping, it does not use that blood for its oxygen needs. Instead there is a set of arteries and veins out on the surface of the heart muscle that feed the muscle. If one of these outer arteries gets blocked, it causes a heart attack. A blockage like this is normally caused by fatty deposits that build up in the heart's arteries over the course of many years. Everything you hear about fat in the diet, cholesterol, coronary artery disease and "clogged arteries" is focused on this problem - it turns out that blocked heart arteries and the heart attacks they cause are a leading killer in the United States.

When one of the heart's arteries gets blocked and a person has a heart attack, one common procedure is to perform open heart surgery and sew in a new piece of blood vessel to bridge over (bypass) the blockage. In many cases the surgeon will fix not only the immediate problem but also other arteries on the heart that are starting to look blocked. If the surgeon repairs three of the arteries it is called a triple bypass. If 4 arteries are repaired it's a quadruple bypass.

The blood vessel used to create the bypass is taken from the chest or the leg - it turns out the body has several redundant vessels and removing them does no harm.

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