• Question: do smaller people have smaller hearts?

    Asked by meganmoult to Fiona, Audra, Gavin, Justin on 21 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Audra Benjamin

      Audra Benjamin answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Yes they do, we are proportional so unless you have some condition that affects your proportions, smaller people would have smaller hearts, up to a point. There would be an increase in organ size with body size until you reach a limit, where it doesn’t matter how much bigger you get the organs won’t get bigger.

    • Photo: Fiona Hatch

      Fiona Hatch answered on 22 Mar 2012:

      Good answer by Audra.

      Usually as a general rule your heart is a bit bigger than your hand/fist (not a tight fist). As you get older your heart size would increase, but so would your hand/fist size, so you can always use that as a rough measurement.

      If you do loads of exercise your heart size might be bigger than that – as with exercise the heart grows slightly larger to cope with the workload.

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