Is your heart on the ‘right’ side ?

Medicine is a gloomy and serious topic for most people, with illnesses,needles, hospitals and suffering coming to the forefront of their minds. But as many aspects of mother nature are, the subject of medicine is highly interesting. Learning about the build and the functions of human body can be quite fascinating. Even more intriguing are the rare cases where mother nature itself deviates from the original prototype, which gives rise to various abnormalities compared to the norm. We will take you through one such intriguing path in this week’s Health Capsule.  

Usually, the human anatomy follows some basic rules. One heart, two kidneys, one liver and one spleen, heart on left side, liver on right, spleen on left and so on.This normal arrangement is called the situs solitus. Did you know that there was a condition called situs inversus, where all the body organs are the mirror images of the situs solitus? So in a person with this condition, the heart would be situated on their right side and the liver would be in the left.  

The condition is very rare, and occurs about 1 in 10000 people.More interesting is the fact that this condition presents in some cases of ‘mirror image twins’. This is a condition where the fertilized ovum is divided later than what usually happens in mono-zygotic (identical) twins, resulting in twins that are literally the mirror images of each other, and in these cases, both inside and out.  

Now, some of our readers might be thinking that this must be quite a serious condition, with all their organs parked on the ‘wrong side’. But interestingly, this isn’t the case. Many of these people live a complete normal life. Until recently, where radiological investigations like chest x-rays and CT scans became abundant, most of them led a normal healthy life, without being discovered at all. I’m sure that you’d be intrigued to know that Enrique Iglesias, the famous singer is also a known person having situs inversus.  

There is also the condition called isolated dextrocardia, meaning ‘right heart’ in Latin,in which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, the heart is situated on the right side. So, when you’ve finished reading this article, don’t forget to put your palm on your chest wall, feeling for your heartbeat, and check if your heart is on the ‘right’ side after all. And the next time when you read something on medicine, always try to look for that intriguing story which is disguised as heavy medical jargon.