Antiarrhythmic therapy can have a key role in prolonging the lives of patients with most common atrial tachyarrhythmias such as atrial flutter (AFL) or atrial fibrillation (AF). The optimal use of antiarrhytmic drug therapy depends in part on understanding the underlying mechanisms of AFL and AF and pharmacodynamis of each antiarrhythmic drug. Currently, there is a large body of experimental an...

The Cox maze III and Cox maze IV procedures are surgical solutions for the treatment of symptomatic stand-alone atrial fibrillation. Despite their proven efficacy, these procedures have not gained widespread acceptance because of the invasiveness, complexity, and technical difficulty. Endocardial pulmonary vein isolation is the cornerstone of percutaneous catheter ablation for atrial fibrillati...

trial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia that affects patient morbidity and mortality. Catheter ablation for AF has emerged as a promising new treatment strategy. In contrast to antiarrhythmic drugs, catheter ablation directly eliminates the inciting factors for AF and offers the possibility of a lasting cure. Various methods of ablating AF have been tried. Creati...

No doubt surgical research has paved the way to curative treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. Long before the idea of catheter ablation was born, accessory atrioventricular pathways were interrupted by surgical knives, ventricular tachycardia was successfully treated by endocardial resection or scar circumcision, and even the first successful approaches to cure atrioventricular nodal re-entrant ta...

Introduction The Maze IV procedure during cardiac surgery is an established treatment for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) concomitant with a mitral valve repair or replacement. Recurrent atrial tachyarrhythmias are mainly left atrial (LA) flutter, which is associated with gaps on previous surgical lesions. Herein, we report a case in which a 3-dimensional mapping system could demonstrate...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia encountered by caregivers for the elderly. A plethora of new, mostly invasive techniques have evolved to treat patients who remain symptomatic from this arrhythmia despite attempts at pharmacological therapy.1-4 The most widely-used of these new techniques is radiofrequency ablation, but in selected patients, special types of pacemaker, cry...

INTRODUCTION Minimally invasive surgical ablation is an emerging alternative method to catheter ablation and the full surgical maze procedure for nonpharmacologic treatment of atrial fibrillation (AF). We present a totally thoracoscopic "box lesion" radiofrequency ablation procedure in patients with paroxysmal or persistent AF. MATERIALS AND METHODS From June 2011 to October 2012, 14 patients...

BACKGROUND Late atrial reentry tachycardia (AT) after Fontan repair is common, with limited efficacy of medical therapy in preventing AT recurrence. In this study, two approaches to surgical arrhythmia ablation in patients with refractory AT undergoing Fontan revision are compared: cryoablation of the inferomedial right atrium (RA), and a more extensive modified RA maze procedure designed to el...