Study Suggests New Ways to End Cardiac Fibrillation

The study was published in the January 30, 2003, online edition of Science.

Normal heartbeat is determined by electrical pulses generated inside the heart, which spread as waves through the cardiac muscle. Should this well-organized behavior be replaced by irregular excitation patterns, cardiac fibrillation results and can be viewed as a form of chaotic behavior. Similar chaotic wave patterns may also develop in systems with chemical reactions.

In the current study, researchers from the Fritz Haber Institute (Berlin, Germany) and the University of Barcelona (Spain) found that this kind of chaos can be suppressed by weak periodic modulation. The research was based on the mathematics of rotating scroll waves, discovered by a US scientist, Arthur Winfree, in 1973 and postulated as a model for cardiac fibrillation. The new results may lead to new methods for terminating cardiac fibrillation.




Related Links:
Fritz Haber Institute
University of Barcelona