Advances in cardiac cellular electrophysiology: implications for automaticity and therapeutics.

Abstract

The purpose of this review is to present a selected number of recent and interesting findings in the field of cellular cardiac electrophysiology. We focus on the cellular level, discuss membrane currents, and relate these currents to the genesis of arrhythmias and the actions of antiarrhythmic drugs. More specifically we consider ITX-sensitive plateau currents, the delayed rectifier current iK, the background K current iK1, as well as the pacemaker current if, We examine their contributions to automaticity in the ventricle and two types of triggered automaticity, the early afterdepolarization and the delayed afterdepolarization. We limit our discussions primarily to studies of normal as compared to diseased tissues, since the latter have been less well characterized.