ATRIAL ARRHYTHMIAS occur in about 10 per cent of acute myocardial infaretions and the commonest of these arrhythmias is atrial fibrillation.' When atrial fibrillation is sustained after beginning during myocardial infarction, it has been reported to be associated with an 89 per cent mortality.2 Although there have been a number of studies on the clinical aspects of the association of such rhyth...

BACKGROUND Genome-wide studies reveal that genetic variants at chromosome 4q25 constitute the strongest locus associated with atrial fibrillation, the most frequent arrhythmia. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are unknown. Our goal is to find and characterize left atrial-expressed transcripts in the chromosome 4q25 atrial fibrillation risk locus that may play a role in atrial...

With increasing use of echocardiography, especially transesophageal echocardiography, the diagnosis of intracardiac masses has surged. Masses that are most commonly seen in the atrial chambers include thrombi due to atrial fibrillation, cardiac myxomas often located in the atria, and valvular vegetations of infective endocarditis. In this report we present a case of a patient who developed thro...

The superior vena cava (SVC) is known to be a potential source of focal atrial tachycardias. Not uncommonly these tachycardias trigger atrial fibrillation or flutter. Focal ablation is safe and effective in eliminating arrhythmogenic foci within the SVC. We present the case of a patient with focal atrial tachycardia arising from the SVC. During presumably focal ablation inadvertent electrical i...

fibrillation recedes very rapidly after the first few minutes following cardioversion as a result of the rapid early phase of reverse remodelling of atrial myocardial electrophysiology, to pace the atria rapidly during this period, such as the 300 ms intervals as in the study in this issue, may actually attenuate this reverse remodelling and perpetuate the profibrillatory state. This may explai...

Reentry occurs when the electrical wave propagating through the atria or ventricles breaks locally and forms a rotor (also called a scroll wave or functional reentry). If the waves propagating outward from a rotor develop additional wavebreaks (which may form new rotors), fibrillation results. Tissue heterogeneity, exacerbated by electrical and structural remodeling from cardiac disease, has tr...

Fibrillation is a dangerous episode in cardiac muscle and so any new work towards the understanding of this process is important to the development of new methods in diagnosis and therapy. In this work we have used surface and intra cardiac ECGs of patients with chronic atrial fibrillation (AF). By means of the blind source separation (BSS) algorithm, which is a well-known method in signal proc...

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: Public grant(s) – EU funding. Main source(s): CATCH ME: Characterizing Atrial fibrillation by Translating its Causes into Health Modifiers in the Elderly Background We recently demonstrated that human atria, endomysial fibrosis causes conduction disturbances during atrial (AF), while overall connective tissue content (over-all fibrosis)...

A trial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common arrhyth-mias, but its mechanisms remain unclear because of the complex human atrial structure and pathology of this disease. 3 and 3-dimensional (3D) structural imaging of the atria in ex vivo animal models 4 have provided a wealth of information for better understanding of AF. 1 However, these high-resolution techniques cannot currently be pe...

BACKGROUND Structural and electrophysiological changes of the atria occur with prolonged rapid rates; however, the effects of sustained atrial fibrillation (AF) on autonomic innervation of the atria are unknown. We hypothesized that electrophysiological remodeling from rapid atrial rates is accompanied by altered atrial autonomic innervation. METHODS AND RESULTS Six dogs (paced group) underwe...