Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have made a fundamental discovery about how the heart compensates for genetic variations that otherwise could trigger abnormal and potentially fatal heart rhythms.
Their findings, reported recently in the journal Circulation, add significantly to understanding what causes abnormal heart rhythms, or arrhythmias, and suggest that certain medications can induce them in susceptible people by overcoming the heart’s compensatory mechanism.
The existence of a compensatory mechanism has been postulated for more than 20 years, but until now, “there was no way to prove it,” said the paper’s first author, Yuko Wada, MD, PhD, a research fellow in Clinical Pharmacology.
“That heart cells somehow recognize they need to ‘fix’ their … ion currents in some way in order to stay normal — this is the first time we’ve seen that,” added the paper’s corresponding author, Dan Roden, MD, director of the John A. Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics.