Imperial College London
Portrait Picture

ProfessorNicholasPeters

Faculty of Medicine, National Heart & Lung Institute

Professor of Cardiac Electrophysiology
 
 
 
//

Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 1880n.peters Website

 
 
//

Assistant

 

Ms Anastasija Schmidt +44 (0)20 7594 1880

 
//

Location

 

NHLI officesSir Michael Uren HubWhite City Campus

//

Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Manani:2016:10.1103/PhysRevE.94.042401,
author = {Manani, KA and Christensen, K and Peters, NS},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevE.94.042401},
journal = {Physical Review E},
title = {Myocardial architecture and patient variability in clinical patterns of atrial fibrillation},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.94.042401},
volume = {94},
year = {2016}
}
Download

RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Atrial fibrillation (AF) increases the risk of stroke by a factor of 4-5 and is the most common abnormal heart rhythm. The progression of AF with age, from short self-terminating episodes to persistence, varies between individuals and is poorly understood. An inability to understand and predict variation in AF progression has resulted in less patient-specific therapy. Likewise, it has been a challenge to relate the microstructural features of heart muscle tissue (myocardial architecture) with the emergent temporal clinical patterns of AF. We use a simple model of activation wave-front propagation on an anisotropic structure, mimicking heart muscle tissue, to show how variation in AF behavior arises naturally from microstructural differences between individuals. We show that the stochastic nature of progressive transversal uncoupling of muscle strands (e.g., due to fibrosis or gap junctional remodeling), as occurs with age, results in variability in AF episode onset time, frequency, duration, burden, and progression between individuals. This is consistent with clinical observations. The uncoupling of muscle strands can cause critical architectural patterns in the myocardium. These critical patterns anchor microreentrant wave fronts and thereby trigger AF. It is the number of local critical patterns of uncoupling as opposed to global uncoupling that determines AF progression. This insight may eventually lead to patient-specific therapy when it becomes possible to observe the cellular structure of a patient's heart.
AU  - Manani,KA
AU  - Christensen,K
AU  - Peters,NS
DO  - 10.1103/PhysRevE.94.042401
PY  - 2016///
SN  - 1539-3755
TI  - Myocardial architecture and patient variability in clinical patterns of atrial fibrillation
T2  - Physical Review E
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.94.042401
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27841583
VL  - 94
ER  -
Download