Cardiac Arrythmia

Structure and function of ion channels

See earlier post: Ion Channel Structure and Function

What is cardiac arrythmia?

See earlier post: Dysrhythmias and Congenital Heart Defects

Cardiac Long QT syndrome

Cardiac Long QT syndrome is, simply put, a prolongation of the QT interval. (If you don't know what a QT interval is, see here.) This can be inherited (autosomal dominant inheritance) or acquired, usually from various drugs.

Detecting abnormal electrical conduction- the ECG

See previous post: The Heartbeat

Also I'm not really sure where to put this, but one disorder that was covered in this lecture is Torsade de Pointes. It's basically a really erratic ECG that appears to be "turning around" on itself every so often. Because I'm terrible at describing this, here's the picture copy-pasted from the lecture slides to give you an idea of what I mean:

Torsade de Pointes is responsible for lovely stuff like ventricular fibrillation and sudden death.

Measurement of ion conductance- the patch-clamp technique

See previous post: Single Cell Electrophysiology Techniques

Current research investigating the effects of hypoxia on ion channels

For those of you who saw the lecture, don't panic- we don't need to know any of this in depth! This was mainly to show us the wider context of how different techniques and so on are used. As for those who didn't attend the lecture, I'll spare you the details, aside from that our lecturer's lab found that hypoxia seems to increase the sensitivity of the L-type Ca²⁺ channel to β-adrenergic receptor stimulation (mainly because that's the one sentence that I actually understood of this part). Oh and also myocardial ischaemia/hypoxia increases circulating and local catecholamines, increasing the risk of arrythmia and sudden death. What a cheerful note to finish this post on!