Cardiovascular and Respiratory Diseases: A 78-Card Flashcard Study Guide

Deck EB0144 — Common Diseases: Cardiovascular & Respiratory holds 78 definition cards on the two systems that share one circuit: the heart pushes blood, the lungs oxygenate it, and each fails in ways the other pays for. The cards themselves are clean — real definitions, no padding, no duplicate pairs — so the work here is sequencing and filling gaps, not repair.

Ten cards, straight from the deck

What the 78 cards cover

Heart and vessels: coronary artery disease, angina pectoris, myocardial infarction, heart failure, hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, left ventricular hypertrophy, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, tachycardia, bradycardia, cardiac arrest, endocarditis, myocarditis, rheumatic heart disease, congenital and valvular heart disease (stenosis vs regurgitation), aortic aneurysm, peripheral artery disease, stroke.

Lungs: asthma and its symptoms, COPD and its two forms, chronic and acute bronchitis, emphysema, pneumonia, tuberculosis, pulmonary embolism, pulmonary fibrosis, bronchiectasis, lung cancer, sleep apnea, pleural effusion, pulmonary hypertension, cor pulmonale.

Workup and treatment: ECG, echocardiogram, cardiac catheterization, chest X-ray and CT, spirometry, angioplasty and stenting, bypass surgery, pacemaker, defibrillator, CPR, thrombolysis, cardiac rehabilitation, statins, beta blockers, aspirin, anticoagulants, bronchodilators, inhalers, corticosteroids, oxygen therapy, mechanical ventilation, HDL vs LDL, the Mediterranean diet.

Signs: dyspnea, cyanosis, hypoxia, hypercapnia.

Study it in two stacks, not in card order

The deck is interleaved. Cards 1–30 are cardiovascular, 31–46 respiratory — then card 47 (spirometry) lands mid-run among cardiac procedures, cards 64–67 swing back to hypertension and left ventricular hypertrophy, and 68–74 return to inhalers and ventilation. Re-sort it into a heart stack and a lung stack, one system per session: you cannot contrast stenosis with regurgitation, or tachycardia with bradycardia, when twenty unrelated cards sit between them. Keep four cards in both stacks — pulmonary hypertension, cor pulmonale, pulmonary embolism, hypoxia — they are the bridge that justifies pairing the two systems in one deck.

Two numbers to date, five cards to write

Card 2 states 17.9 million CVD deaths (32.1%) in 2015: that pair of figures is WHO's 2019 estimate, and current Global Burden of Disease work puts the total near 20 million. Card 9 defines hypertension as ≥140/90 mmHg — correct under WHO and European guidelines, but US ACC/AHA guidance has used ≥130/80 since 2017. Write the guideline name on the card; that split is what gets tested.

Then add the definitions the deck leans on but never teaches: deep vein thrombosis (the pulmonary embolism card assumes the clot came from somewhere), transient ischemic attack, ARDS, stent (named inside the angioplasty card only), and ejection fraction — the heart failure card gives no HFrEF/HFpEF split. Three fronts also lost their question stems in import ("Beta blockers used for", "Chest X-ray used for", "Corticosteroids used for in respiratory disease"); read them as fill-in-the-blank rather than rewriting them.

Deck EB0144 lives in the Flip It library at flip-it.app.

More in this series: Infectious, autoimmune and neuropsychiatric conditions · GI, endocrine and dermatological diseases