What Are Cardiac Muscles?

Cardiac Muscle fibres are long cylinder shaped cells that usually have one or two nuclei, they are centrally located within the cell. The end of the fibres are split into a number of small branches in which the ends of which connect to similar branches of adjacent cells giving a three dimensional cytoplasmic connection network throughout the tissue. In between the muscle fibres, there is a delicate connective tissue, similar to the endomysium of the skeletal muscle which supports the extremely rich capillary network necessary to meet the high metabolism demands of strong and continuous activity by the cardiac muscle. Similar to the skeletal muscle, the sarcomere is the contractile unit of the myocardial cell. Between the ends of the muscle cells there are specialised intercellular junctions that are called intercalated discs. Intercalated discs are irregular transverse thickenings of the sarcolemma that contains structures that are called desmosomes and these hold muscle fibres together. …show more content…
Skeletal Muscle are tightly bound together in comparison to cardiac muscle and as previously mentioned unlike skeletal muscles there are gap junctions found in cardiac muscles whereas in Skeletal muscle there is only a common contraction known as syncytium and they also do not have any gap junctions. In Cardiac Muscles the mitochondria and endomysium are really dense in cardiac muscles compared to skeletal muscle - moreover the mitochondria in muscle cells have much more blood vessels and because this is the case about 25% of the space/structure is occupied by the mitochondria whereas in comparison to skeletal muscle only about 2% of the space is occupied by the