Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology On the Beat

Dr Paul Wang:                   Welcome to the monthly podcast, On the Beat, for Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology. I'm Dr Paul Wang, editor-in-chief, with some of the key highlights from this month's issue.

Dr Paul Wang:                   In our first paper, Farhad Pashakhanloo and associates examine the three-dimensional structure of the healed infarct and the ventricular tachycardia reentrant pathways in high-resolution models of infarcted porcine hearts. The authors used ex vivo late gadolinium enhancement in diffusion tensor MRI data of eight chronically infarcted porcine hearts at sub-millimeter resolution in a novel scar map thickness metric to reveal the heterogeneous organization of infarct. The authors use simulation to model ventricular tachycardia pathways. They found that a surviving sub-endocardial tissue later of varying thickness less than or equal to 2.2 millimeters surrounding the scar participated in the majority of ventricular tachycardias. The authors concluded that these analyses provided a better understanding of infarc-related ventricular tachycardia.

Dr Paul Wang:                   In our next paper, Thomas Hadberg Lynge and associates studied the incidence of sudden cardiac death in a population of congenital heart disease in Denmark. Among 24.4 million person years over a nine-year period, there were 11,451 deaths that were examined. Of 809 cases of sudden cardiac death, 90, or 11% of the cases, were from congenital heart disease. Of these cases, 53, or 59% had the diagnosis of congenital heart disease prior to death. The incidence of sudden cardiac death was 9.6 times higher among patients with congenital heart disease compared to patients without congenital heart disease, p