Publication Date:
1997-02-07
Description:
Generally, impulse propagation in cardiac tissue is assumed to be impaired by a reduction of intercellular electrical coupling or by the presence of structural discontinuities. Contrary to this notion, the spatially uniform reduction of electrical coupling induced successful conduction in discontinuous cardiac tissue structures exhibiting unidirectional conduction block. This seemingly paradoxical finding can be explained by a nonsymmetric effect of uncoupling on the current source and the current sink in the preparations used. It suggests that partial cellular uncoupling might prevent the initiation of cardiac arrhythmias that are dependent on the presence of unidirectional conduction block.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Rohr, S -- Kucera, J P -- Fast, V G -- Kleber, A G -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 1997 Feb 7;275(5301):841-4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Physiology, University of Bern, Buhlplatz 5, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland. rohr@pyl.unibe.ch〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9012353" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Action Potentials
;
Animals
;
Arrhythmias, Cardiac/physiopathology
;
Cells, Cultured
;
Diffusion
;
Fatty Acids, Monounsaturated/pharmacology
;
Gap Junctions/physiology
;
Heart/*physiology
;
Heart Conduction System/*physiology
;
Microscopy, Video
;
Rats
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
