Your heart is amazing.

It beats roughly 100,000 times a day. During a year it will pump about 250million litres of blood around your body – enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool with a bit left over. Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting.

It keeps you alive – supplying blood to the 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries in your body and all of this is done by an organ, which if you’re an adult, it’s about the size of two fists.

It’s an incredible muscle but too many of us take it for granted – through our lifestyles we damage it, through eating and drinking too much we cause it harm or by smoking we constrain its ability to work.

The impact can be sobering – the British Heart Foundation estimates cardiovascular (heart and circulatory) disease causes more than a quarter (26 per cent) of all deaths in the UK; that’s nearly 160,000 deaths each year – an average of 435 people each day or one death every three minutes.

But there is hope. Since British Heart Foundation was founded over 50 years ago, the annual number of deaths from CVD in the UK has fallen by half. This has been through the way we live our lives but also the hug medical advances we have made.

This week we will demonstrate through films, talks and stories how organisations on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus are working to save lives and help the heart survive.

We will explain how scientists are working to ‘mend a broken heart’, celebrate the centenary of Royal Papworth Hospital, show how heart cells are born, give you general heart advice plus much much more

So please follow #CBCheart throughout the week to find out more.