Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common type of arrhythmia, affecting more than 2.2 million Americans. One effective treatment is cardiac ablation, which shows a high rate of success in treating paroxysmal AF. As a prevailing modality for this treatment, catheter ablation using radiofrequency has been effective, but comes with measurable morbidity and significant costs and time associated w...

Background-—Left atrial appendage (LAA) exclusion has been performed in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) to prevent thrombus formation and subsequent cardioembolic events. Left atrial electrical remodeling is a recognized factor in the recurrence of AF. The effects of LAA exclusion on P-wave characteristics and left atrial electrical remodeling have not been well described. The purpose of...

BACKGROUND The pivot is critical to rotors postulated to maintain atrial fibrillation (AF). We reasoned that wavefronts circling the pivot should broaden the amplitude distribution of bipolar electrograms because of directional information encoded in these signals. We aimed to determine whether Shannon entropy (ShEn), a measure of signal amplitude distribution, could differentiate the pivot fro...

Studies on patients and large animal models suggest the importance of atrial fibrosis in the development of atrial fibrillation (AF). To investigate whether increased fibrosis is sufficient to produce a substrate for AF, we have studied cardiac electrophysiology (EP) and inducibility of atrial arrhythmias in MHC-TGFcys33ser transgenic mice (Tx), which have increased fibrosis in the atrium but n...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is associated with a high prevalence of AF, and uremic toxins are an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases associated with CKD. Uremic toxins can produce pro-fibrotic, pro-hypertrophic, and pro-inflammatory effects on cardiac tissues and enhance oxidative stress or neurohormonal phenomena of...

Ischaemic strokes resulting from atrial fibrillation (AF) constitute a devastating condition for patients and their carers with huge burden on health care systems. Prophylactic treatment against systemic embolization and ischaemic strokes is the cornerstone for the management of AF. Effective stroke prevention requires the use of the vitamin K antagonists or non-vitamin K oral anticoagulants (N...

BACKGROUND Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly encountered arrhythmia and is associated with an elevated risk of stroke. Improving the identification of patients with the highest risk for AF to enable appropriate surveillance and treatment, if necessary, is critical to reducing AF-associated morbidity and mortality. Multiple common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are unequivoca...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine if: 1) insulin-like growth factor binding protein-1 (IGFBP-1) in amniotic fluid (AF) exhibited proteolytic cleavage in cases of intra-amniotic inflammation; and 2) if the matrix metalloproteinases (MMP-3, MMP-8, MMP-9) in AF are associated with the degradation of IGFBP-1 in AF. METHODS AF samples (n=20) were obtained from preterm gestations...

Chronic atrial fibrillation (AF) is characterized by decreased atrial contractility, shortened action potential duration, and decreased accommodation of action potential duration to changes in activation rate. Studies on experimental animal models of AF implicate a reduction in L-type Ca current (ICa) density in these changes. To evaluate the effect of AF on human ICa, we compared ICa in atrial...