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(Circulation Research. 2002;91:985.)
© 2002 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorials

An Electric Field Mechanism for Transmission of Excitation Between Myocardial Cells

Nicholas Sperelakis

From the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Correspondence to Prof Nicholas Sperelakis, PhD, Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH 45267-0576. E-mail spereln@uc.edu

Key Words: propagation in cardiac muscle • intercalated disk physiology • junctional cleft potential • electric field mechanism • resistance between myocardial cells

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

A long-standing dogma in basic electrophysiology of the heart has been that the atrial and ventricular myocardial cells are interconnected by low-resistance pathways mediated by gap-junction connexon channels.¹ This dogma became established based on the publications of a number of investigators, including Weidmann,² Woodbury and Crill,³ and DeMello.⁴ It was concluded that the input resistance of myocardial cells in a bundle was very low (eg, 30 K), the length constant () of the bundle was very long (eg, 1.5 mm), and that local-circuit action current spreads readily from cell to cell. The ultrastructure of mammalian myocardium showed presence of numerous gap junctions.⁵ This dogma has become ingrained in most textbooks and advanced reference books dealing with the heart.

This dogma still lives on despite the facts that it is now accepted that the input resistance is high (eg, 5 to 40 M) and the length constant is very short (eg, 150 to 350 µm) (see references in Sperelakis and McConnell^6,7). For example, an input resistance for myocardial cells, measured in isolated cell pairs, was 27 to 37 M,⁸ and the value for myocardial bundles was reported to be 357 µm.⁹ Propagation in cardiac muscle is now accepted as being discontinuous (or saltatory) in nature.¹⁰ In addition, gap junctions are scarce or absent in the hearts of nonmammalian vertebrates, such as birds, lizards, frogs, and fish (for references, see Reference ⁶). Despite this, the hearts in those lower vertebrates function normally.

The low-resistance dogma was first . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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