Beating 100,000 times each day, the human heart performs its pumping action about 2.5 billion times in a single lifetime. Imagine a man-made engine with this kind of endurance! If the heart were a car, it would last 333 years.

Nothing illustrates the hard-working heart, and its occasional need for a tune-up, better than heart charts. In full color, with images and corresponding text, either as a flip chart or as single, double-sized pages, these charts discuss everything from a healthy heart to a heart compromised by a group of medical risk factors, called Metabolic Syndrome.

Beginning with The Heart chart, which offers an overview of the internal and external structures of the human heart, including major valves and electrical pathways, the chart depicts and describes the circulatory system and the cardiac cycle.

From there, a 12-page anatomical flip chart, Understanding Hypertension, lead to a general discussion of a chronic condition in which blood pressure is consistently elevated. This condition, which affects one in four American adults, is the first sign that heart problems are accruing and suggests changes in lifestyle, including diet, smoking cessation, exercise, and stress and alcohol reduction.

A second, single-page chart, the Effects of Hypertension, expands on the theme by taking a closer look at these risk factors and the damage to the heart that accrues as a result – namely damaged blood vessels and a thickening of the heart wall. Also discussed and fully illustrated are the peripheral effects of hypertension, including an enlarged heart, kidney failure, brain or neurological damage, and changes in the retina at the back of the eyes. A separate but equally relevant discussion (with images) describes the progressive plaque build-up that occurs with hypertension.

A third mandatory chart in the series for understanding hypertension, or high blood pressure, is the High Blood Pressure chart, which gives a more detailed description of the causes, effects and risk factors for hypertension. This chart also suggests treatment options, including diet changes, which can help ameliorate blood pressure.

The Understanding Angina chart takes patients, and their physicians, on a guided tour of the types of angina, their causes, and the treatment options available. From external views of a damaged heart to cross-sectional images and text showing an artery blocked by plaque, this chart is ideally suited for explaining a problem which currently plagues more than 1.6 million Americans and is a warning sign of serious, future heart problems.

Understanding PAD is another valuable tool in the physician's battle against heart disease. Peripheral Artery Disease, afflicting between 8 and 12 million Americans, is a circulatory problem related to heart dysfunction, and this chart displays – in 10 full-color images and accompanying text – how poor circulation can lead to stroke, thrombosis (blood clots) and atherosclerosis, a chronic inflammatory response in the walls of arteries as a result of plaque buildup due to fatty diets, little exercise, smoking, stress and generally poor lifestyles.

The Understanding Heart Disease chart is an overview of heart-related defects, including angina, heart attack, heart rhythm disturbances like ventricular tachycardia (or SVT) and congestive heart failure, or CHF. In addition to sagittal views of the formation of plaques, the chart also includes common warning symptoms.

Metabolic Syndrome is a group of affects, or risk factors, that encompass excess abdominal fat, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, insulin resistance or diabetes, a tendency to blood clots (the prothrombotic state) and a tendency to inflammatory states like atherosclerosis. The Understanding Metabolic Syndrome chart looks at all these risk factors and also discusses genetic and environmental factors that contribute to Metabolic Syndrome. An additional section, which recommends diet and lifestyle changes, makes this a handy tool in the cardiologists arsenal against heart failure and death.