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. In our first paper, Leroy Joseph and associates examined whether an increase in dietary saturated fat could lead to abnormalities of calcium homeostasis and heart rhythm, by an NADPH oxidase 2, NOX2-dependent mechanism. In mice on high fat diets, they found that saturated fat activates NOX, whereas polyunsaturated fat does not. The high saturated fat diet increased repolarization heterogeneity in ventricular tachycardia, VT inducibility in perfused hearts. Pharmacologic inhibition or genetic deletion of NOX2 prevented arrhythmogenic abnormalities in vivo during high saturated fat diet and resulted in less inducible VT. On the other hand, high saturated fat diet activates calcium calmodulin dependent protein kinase in the heart, which contributes to abnormal calcium handling, promoting arrhythmia. This work sugg