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Today's heart simulations may someday make traumatic jolts from heart defibrillators a thing of the past.
The sound of a beating heart—the familiar lub dub that accompanies our daily rhythms—can suddenly, with no warning, go wrong. The heart's electrical signals go haywire, the pumping cycle is disrupted, and the heart quivers, or fibrillates, uncontrollably. Unless corrected, death results in a matter of minutes. The leading cause of sudden cardiac death in the United States, ventricular fibrillation kills 350,000 people every year. Occurring most often in older patients with damaged heart tissue, it can also strike healthy young adults with no history of heart disease. The only known antidote is a powerful, potentially damaging jolt from a defibrillator, the ever-present electrical paddles that accompany the call to "Clear!" on emergency medical television shows. Defibrillators are found not only in hospitals but also in airplanes, airports, and, increasingly, implanted in patients' chests. While advocates would place a set of paddles in every home, some scientists believe that defibrillators are not the final answer. A defibrillator is what you use when you are clueless," says cardiac physiologist Alan Garfinkel. | ||
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Garfinkel, a professor in the departments of medicine and physiological science at the University of California at Los Angeles, is anything but clueless. His research group's models of fibrillation in simulated heart tissue give him the opportunity to explore the malady and its causes. Created using Alliance supercomputers at the Maui High Performance Computing Center, the models also offer hope for new and better treatment
"Alan's elegant work offers the possibility of designing interventions to prevent fibrillation from occurring at all," says Kenneth Stein, a professor of cardiology at Cornell University Medical College. | |
Access Online | Posted 3-14-2000 | |||
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