Why is the heart slightly to the left in the chest?
The heart’s left ventricle has to be bigger as it pumps oxygen rich blood round the whole body, meaning the heart is skewed to the left.
Asked by: Adam King, Huddersfield
The heart is located fairly centrally beneath the breastbone, but it does protrude towards the left. This is because the heart’s bottom-left chamber (the ‘left ventricle’) is responsible for pumping oxygenated blood around the whole body, so it needs to be stronger and larger than the right ventricle, which only pumps blood to the lungs. It’s this left ventricle that you can feel beating in your chest. One in 10,000 people actually have a mirror-image heart which points towards the right – a condition known as ‘dextrocardia’.
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