Our bodies contain several different systems and are made up of tissues and organs. All the systems work together in a complicated way to break down foods, intake oxygen, expel waste, communicate between each other, process outside stimuli, and more.
Read a short description of what each body system does here https://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps and watch the short video below.
In particular, the cardiovascular and respiratory systems work together to get oxygen out of the atmosphere and move that oxygen to various organs and tissues. The lungs help to oxygenate the blood, the heart then pumps that blood out to the other parts of the body, and blood vessels circulate the oxygenated blood around the body, and bring carbon dioxide to the lungs to exhale.
Organic changes in the cardiovascular system can lead to heart disease – the leading cause of death for most demographic groups in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/about/index.html. One of the most common system-wide changes is atherosclerosis, the narrowing and hardening of arteries throughout the body. This process can lead to heart attacks, pain in the chest, strokes, and other consequences. Heart attacks (myocardial infarctions) usually happen when the blood supply and oxygen are disrupted to a part of the heart and the heat cells begin to die. This tends to happen because the coronary arteries become closed off or narrow.
Similarly, strokes happen either because of a bleed in the blood vessels in the brain, or a lack of blood and thus oxygen to a part of the brain. Both strokes and heart attacks can be fatal or survivable, depending on the size of the damaged tissue.
Another leading cause of death is cancer. Cancer is a name given to several related diseases. In general, when people have cancer, some cells in their bodies divide uncontrolled and spread to other tissues. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-is-cancer Cancer can happen for various reasons, but commonly it happens because of genes inherited from our parents, or exposure to toxins, infectious agents, radiation and others.
