Q.What does a Pace Maker do ?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The pacemaker (the sino-atrial or SA node) is a small patch of specialised cardiac muscle in the wall of the right atrium that generates its own rhythmic electrical impulses, initiating and setting the pace of every heartbeat.
The heart is myogenic, meaning it can beat on its own rhythm without needing a signal from the nervous system to trigger each individual beat. This is possible because of the sino-atrial (SA) node, located in the upper wall of the right atrium near the opening of the superior vena cava. The SA node is made of specialised cardiac muscle cells that spontaneously and repeatedly generate electrical impulses at a regular rate (roughly 70-75 times per minute at rest in humans). Each impulse spreads across both atria, causing them to contract together, and is then relayed via the atrio-ventricular (AV) node and the bundle of His/Purkinje fibres to make the ventricles contract in a coordinated way shortly after. Because the SA node sets this …
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