Atrial fibrillation significantly contributes to mortality and morbidity through increased risk of stroke, heart failure and myocardial infarction. Investigations of mechanisms responsible for the development and maintenance of atrial fibrillation have highlighted the importance of gap junctional remodeling. Connexins 40 and 43, the major atrial gap junctional proteins, undergo considerable alt...

Management of atrial fibrillation in the elderly presents unique challenges, including deciding upon the best treatment strategy: rate control versus rhythm control. The decision to pursue one treatment strategy over another is based on understanding the underlying disorder: symptomatology from atrial fibrillation itself versus symptoms due to a rapid ventricular response from atrial fibrillati...

The Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome can rarely present with pre-excited atrial fibrillation. In this condition the short refractory period of the accessory pathway can lead to rapid atrioventricular conduction. There is then a danger that at high heart rates the irregular broad complex tachycardia that results can deteriorate into ventricular fibrillation. The initial management of patients pres...

BACKGROUND Recently, interest has arisen in using biphasic waveforms for external defibrillation. Little work has been done, however, in measuring transthoracic defibrillation efficacy after long periods of ventricular fibrillation. In protocol 1, we compared the efficacy of a quasi-sinusoidal biphasic waveform (QSBW), a truncated exponential biphasic waveform (TEBW), and a critically damped si...

BACKGROUND New-onset atrial fibrillation in patients hospitalized for an acute myocardial infarction often leads to hemodynamic deterioration and has serious adverse prognostic implications; mortality is particularly high in patients with congestive heart failure and/or a reduced left ventricular ejection fraction. The mechanism of atrial fibrillation in the context of an acute myocardial infar...

atrial fibrillation during vagal nerve stimulation in the canine heart: restudying the Moe hypothesis. J Cardiovasc Electrophysiol 2013;24:328–35. 14. Haissaguerre M, Jais P, Shah DC, Takahashi A, Hocini M, Quiniou G et al. Spontaneous initiation of atrial fibrillation by ectopic beats originating in the pulmonary veins. N Engl J Med 1998;339:659–66. 15. Sahadevan J, Ryu K, Peltz L, Khrestian C...

INTRODUCTION Atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter account for one third of hospitalizations due to arrhythmias, determining great social and economic impacts. In Brazil, data on hospital care of these patients is scarce. OBJECTIVE To investigate the arrhythmia subtype of atrial fibrillation and flutter patients in the emergency setting and compare the clinical profile, thromboembolic risk a...

AIM We aimed to investigate whether different measures of obesity could similarly predict atrial fibrillation, and whether the atrial fibrillation risk associated with obesity is dependent on presence of metabolic syndrome. MATERIAL AND METHODS We performed our study in a population-based longitudinal cardiovascular study, comprising 1 924 men and 2 097 women, aged 60 years, from Stockholm. B...

Background. The goal of the report was to study the long-term incidence and the independent predictors for chronic atrial fibrillation and stroke in 507 paced patients with sick sinus syndrome, adjusting for differences in baseline clinical variables with multivariate analysis. Methods and Results. From 1980 to 1989, we implanted 376 dual-chamber, 19 atrial, and 112 ventricular pacemakers to tr...

• The mechanisms of atrial fibrillation and flutter have been subjects of continuous controversy. Fibrillation is a more complicated arrhythmia than flutter, and many previous analyses of flutter have been extended to fibrillation. Since the similarity of the mechanisms underlying these two arrhythmias has not been demonstrated, many current theories on the mechanism of fibrillation are therefo...