Nursing Blog

In 1787 Galvani was the first to discover the relationship between electrical currents and muscle contractions. In 1843 Carlo Matteucci detected that the heart’s activity is also based on electrical currents. The first graphic representation of this was made by E.J. Marey in 1876. The breakthrough came with the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven who was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for the invention of the electrocardiography. The deflections and curve descriptions developed by him are still in use today. These deflections were amended by the American cardiologist Emanuel Goldberger on limb leads and by Frank Wilson on precordial leads. The electrocardiogram records the electrical activity of the heart. The heart is a muscular organ which beats in rhythm to pump the blood through the body. The signals that make the heart’s muscle fibres contract come from the sinoatrial node, which is the natural pacemaker of the heart. In an ECG test, the electrical impulses made while the hea...

Electrocardiography (ECG or EKG from the German Elektrokardiogramm) is a transthoracic (across the thorax or chest) interpretation of the electrical activity of the heart over a period of time, as detected by electrodes attached to the outer surface of the skin and recorded by a device external to the body. The recording produced by this noninvasive procedure is termed an electrocardiogram (also ECG or EKG). The etymology of the word is derived from the Greek electro, because it is related to electrical activity, kardio, Greek for heart, and graph, a Greek root meaning "to write". In English speaking countries, medical professionals often write EKG (the abbreviation for the German word elektrokardiogramm) in order to avoid confusion with EEG in emergency situations where background noise is high. Most EKGs are performed for diagnostic or research purposes on human hearts, but may also be performed on other animals, usually for research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocar...

The heart is the organ that circulated the blood in the body through its rhythmic beating. The heart follows a specific pattern for the "heart beats" which are regulated by electrical signals generated in the cardiac region. The signals are mainly generated by the Sinoatrial node (SA node, in the right atrium) and the Atrioventricular node (AV node, in lower ventricular area). When there is a problem in the functioning, the heart beats are studied by the ECG machine and the information recorded by it. The ECG readings help the cardiologist to interpret the condition of the patient's heart. The ECG readings appear in the form of a graph called the PORST graph or waves. One entire unit comprises of the P wave, the QRS complex and the ST wave, which successively follow each other. The first wave indicates the contraction of the auricles (anterior part of the heart), the second section represents contraction of the ventricles (the lower part of the cardiac chamber), while the...