patients with valvular heart disease and suffering atrial fibrillation of more than 12 months duration have a low probability of remaining in sinus rhythm after valve surgery alone. we performed intra-operative radiofrequency ablation or cryoablation as an alternative to surgical maze ііі procedure to create linear lesion lines for conversion of this arrhythmia to sinus rhythm. a total of 30 pa...

the prevalence of atrial fibrillation (af) is 1-2 % in the general population, and the risk of embolic stroke in af patients is 4-5 times higher than that in the general population. af-related strokes are often severe, and the rate of permanent disability is much higher among individuals who have af-related strokes than in those who have strokes unrelated to af. in patients with af, more than 9...

patients with valvular heart disease suffer from atrial fibrillation for more than 12 months after valve surgery and have a low probability of remaining in sinus rhythm. we performed an intra-operative procedure similar to surgical maze ііі procedure for conversion of this arrhythmia to sinus rhythm. we did this study to evaluate the efficacy of this procedure to restore the sinus rhythm in pat...

Fibrillation is a hazardous phenomenon 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 p...

BACKGROUND Structural and phenotypic changes of cardiomyocytes characterize atrial fibrillation. We investigated whether changes in the glucose-regulated protein GRP94, which is essential for cell viability, occur in the presence of chronic atrial fibrillation. METHODS AND RESULTS Samples of fibrillating atrial myocardium obtained from both goat and human hearts were analyzed for GRP94 expres...

fibrillation is a hazardous phenomenon 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 p...

OBJECTIVE Our goal was to study rate adaptation of atrial action potentials in non-steady and steady states to further our understanding of mechanisms determining inducibility and stability of atrial fibrillation. METHODS We used standard microelectrode techniques to examine the characteristics of steady-state action potentials paced at regular cycle lengths (CL) and of nonsteady-state action...

BACKGROUND Different atrial arrhythmias can coexist in the recipient and donor atria after heart transplantation. CASE PRESENTATION We report an unusual case of a patient with three different types of atrial arrhythmia after heart transplantation: an atrial fibrillation in the recipient atria, and a cavotricuspid isthmus dependent atrial flutter and a focal atrial tachycardia in the donor atr...

The atrioventricular (AV) node is the only conduction pathway between the atria and ventricles, it is located at the base of the right atrium. The conduction through the atrioventricular node is slow to allow the atria to pump blood into the ventricles before they contract. It also acts as a backup pacemaker, in case the sinoatrial node fails and limits the number of action potentials conducted...

OBJECTIVE Thrombin, the final coagulation product of the coagulation cascade, has been demonstrated to have many physiological effects, including pro-fibrotic actions via protease-activated receptor (PAR)-1. Recent investigations have demonstrated that activation of the cardiac local coagulation system was associated with atrial fibrillation. However, the distribution of thrombin in the heart, ...