Gruesome pictures shows giant cocaine-ravaged heart continue to beat for 25 minutes outside body

A normal heart can be expected to beat for maybe 60 seconds after being removed - but one affected by heavy cocaine use still pulsates for up to 25 minutes.
A video shows a heart, enlarged to three times its normal size by cocaine abuse, pulsating away.
It was removed from an addict who abused the Class A drug for 15 years.
The video is from MEDspiration, a non-profit organisation specialising in the art of medicine and science.

Enlarged: The heart was three times its normal size

Nav Badesha, MEDspiration’s CEO and president, said the “heart’s inability to stop contracting may be due to the adaptation the heart cells underwent due to long-term cocaine abuse.”
As well as increasing the user's heart rate it also decreases the “coronary heart flow due to adrenergic vasoconstriction of the vessels.”
So while the heart is trying to cope with the extra workload it is hampered by less blood and oxygen flow and this is what leads to it being enlarged.
Badasha explained: “It is possible that this heart had become so adapted to myocardial ischemia over the past 15 years that it became resilient enough to beat without an oxygen supply for 25 minutes!”