ACHY BREAKY HEART

Achy Breaky Heart
Spiral Waves Break Hearts
New Research Stresses the Importance of Communication between Cardiac Cells
MONTREAL, CANADA (February 5, 2002)--Who says physicists don't have heart? In an effort to study the factors that lead to fatal cardiac rhythms, a team of Canadian physicists has shown that the importance of communication applies not only to people, but also to their heart cells. The researchers report their results in today's issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Sudden cardiac death kills more than 250,000 people each year in the US alone. Physicists have been studying the important role that electricity plays in the heart's health-and how it may be a culprit in disease..
Electrical impulses regularly circulate through cardiac tissue and cause the heart's muscle fibers to contract. In a healthy heart, these electrical impulses travel smoothly and unobstructed, like a water wave that ripples gently in a pond. However, for reasons that have not been perfectly understood, these waves can sometimes develop into troublesome, whirlpool-like spirals of electrical activity that can circulate through the heart.
Investigating these “spiral waves,” scientists at McGill University in Montreal studied chick-embryo cardiac cells grown as a sheet of tissue. For the first two days after this arrangement of cells is created, spiral waves often form in the tissue. When the researchers sprinkled the sheet of cardiac tissue with a drug that impairs communication between the cells, rotating spiral waves broke up into multiple rotating spirals.
This spiral wave breakup is believed to be similar to the processes that lead to ventricular fibrillation, a potentially fatal cardiac rhythm that often occurs when communication between cells is impaired. In a real-world situation, reduced intercellular communication may be caused by a heart attack or by other cardiac diseases, which can produce diseased or damaged heart tissue.
Developing a theory to explain their experimental findings, the researchers gave credence to another poetic notion: electrical activity in cardiac tissue can spread like a fire in the heart. In a simplified computer model of the experimental results, the cells are irregularly distributed in space. In their model, electrical activity in cardiac tissue proliferates like a fire in a forest. Like trees, cells “light up,” or become electrically active, if enough neighboring cells display a sufficient level of electrical activity.
The model explores several scenarios, corresponding to different amounts of communication between cells. When neighboring cells are able to interact or communicate strongly with one another, electrical waves quickly pass through the tissue, unobstructed. When the interactions between cells are weak, wave propagation is completely blocked. At intermediate levels of interaction, electrical waves break up into multiple spiral waves.

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About the said invention, my stand as a student nurse, usually electrical impulses in terms of physics, really helps a lot in everyday life because there are certain things that electrical impulses really works like for example in appliances in all machinery works, in hospital, and used in operating any things, that it is very useful. About the said electrical impulses that was invented and discussed by the scientist, in other ways it is effective in
Helping the heart if there is cardiac problems, but there are certain things that must consider, usually a heart must have no obstruction and healthy, because when it’s not it could easily produce ventricular fibrillation, or cold have abnormal heart beating that could alter his circulation and could end his life. Understanding the effects of communication between cells provides insights into the electrical malfunctions that are suspected to lead to heart disorders, and may ultimately suggest strategies for avoiding them. In addition, spiral wave patterns, electrical and otherwise, appear in many other places in nature. The researchers' observations can help to explain the appearance of multiple spiral waves in the corrosion on metal surfaces, the aggregation of slime molds, and visually striking chemical reactions that display ever-changing patterns.