Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. You may be asking yourself, why is there a new

jingle at the start of the podcast? Well, that's because we're starting a whole new season and a

whole new series of the Zero to Finals podcast where we'll be covering pediatrics. And I thought

it might be worth doing a whole new jingle

in order to separate which episodes are for medicine and which episodes are for pediatrics.

So I hope you get used to it and I hope you like it. It was created by Harry Watchman,

who edits all of the podcasts. This first episode will be starting with cardiology in

pediatrics and the first episode will be about fetal circulation. As always, if you want to follow

along, you can follow along at zero to finals.com slash fetal circulation or with these new episodes, you can follow along in the Pediatrics book.

So let's get straight into it.

It's really important to understand fetal circulation.

And this will help you understand the changes that happen in a baby at birth,

the circulation of the neonate, and also the causes of murmurs in babies and children.

So let's go through some basic theory first. In the fetus, blood needs to go via the placenta

in order to collect oxygen and nutrients and to dispose of waste products such as carbon dioxide

and lactate.

Therefore, there needs to be a way for the blood to travel to the placenta and back again to the body.

As the fetal lungs are not fully developed or functional,

it doesn't make sense for fetal blood to pass through the pulmonary circulation.

Therefore, there are three shunts that allow blood to bypass the lungs of the fetus and also to make its way to the placenta and back again.

Those three fetal shunts are the ductus venosis, the pheromone ovalee and the ductus arteriosis.

So firstly, let's talk about the ductus venosis. This is a shunt that connects the umbilical artery to the inferior vener caver

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