Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Bradycardia
/ˌbrædɪˈkɑrdiə/noun
A resting heart rate below about 60 beats a minute.
The Greek roots
βραδύς
bradýs
slow
καρδία
kardía
heart
Literally: “slow heart”
The story of the word
The number is a convention, not a verdict. Trained endurance athletes routinely rest in the forties and sometimes the thirties because a stronger stroke moves the same blood in fewer beats, so the same reading that means fitness in a cyclist can mean a failing conduction system in an eighty-year-old. βραδύς turns up again in bradykinin, named for how slowly it makes gut muscle contract, and in Bradypus, the sloth's genus.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
tachycardiacardiacbradykininmyocardium
In a sentence
The bradycardia was symptomatic, so she was booked for a pacemaker.
His watch flags bradycardia every night and he has stopped looking.