How long does it take for blood to cycle through the body?
Biology · High School · Thu Feb 04 2021
Answered on
On an average, it takes about 45 seconds for blood to circulate from the heart, all around the body, and back to the heart again. An average adult's heart beats more than 100,000 times a day. A given blood cell will have to journey along the arterial side of the circulation to a distant capillary, emerge from that into the venous side, reach the right side of the heart and be pumped into the lungs, and traverse a pulmonary capillary there to enter the pulmonary veins which return blood to the left side of the heart. But to be technical, a corpuscle which happens to be directed into a proximal end-organ (such as the heart muscle itself) would take considerably less time than one which journeyed to a foot capillary … so you might need to average out all potential journeys in the human body!