Microfibrosis produces electrical load variations due to loss of side-to-side cell connections: a major mechanism of structural heart disease arrhythmias

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how adaptive changes in myocardial microstructure provide mechanisms for emergent new conduction disturbances that initiate reentrant arrhythmias. The mechanisms are based on discontinuous conduction phenomena produced by increases in cellular loading; these increases result from changes in the normal distribution of the gap junctions. Recent studies that at a microscopic level propagation in normal mature cardiac muscle is stochastic. For example, the nonuniform and irregular distribution of the gap junctions in such normal muscle produces load variations that are associated with changes in Vmax inside individual cells during both longitudinal and transverse propagation. The stochastic nature of normal propagation at a microscopic level offers considerable protection against arrhythmias by reestablishing the general trend of wavefront movement after small variations in excitation events occur. If such microscopic diversity is decreased, large fluctuations in load develop that are distributed over more cells than usual. The decrease in diversity may be caused by loss of side-to-side coupling between fibers, which produces relatively isolated groups of cells with microfibrosis. With loss of side-to-side fiber coupling, the myocardial architecture may fail to reestablish a smoothed wavefront at the macroscopic level. Spatial nonuniformities of electrical loading then give rise to conduction block and reentry.