Cardiac auscultation is a clinical skill that involves listening to normal heart sounds and abnormal heart sounds using a stethoscope. It is a low-tech way of detecting disease directly without expensive scanners, blood work, or pathology reports—and another reminder that the art of medicine is not a lost art despite today’s technology. Moreover, heart disease is so common that we see plenty of it in many different specialties. Before we get into pathologic sounds, though, we need to learn the basics of normal heart sounds.
After listening to this Audio Brick, you should be able to:
- Explain how hemodynamic and electrocardiogram (ECG) events correlate with normal S1 and S2 heart sounds.
- Explain the physiology of normal S2 splitting.
- Explain the physiology and causes of the following types of abnormal S2 splitting: wide splitting, fixed splitting, and reversed splitting (paradoxical splitting).
- Define the extra S3 and S4 heart sounds and describe their timing, physiology, and clinical significance.
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