Does chronic vagal nerve stimulation reduce ventricular arrhythmias and mitigate adverse neural cardiac remodeling post-myocardial infarction?
Chronic vagal nerve stimulation post-myocardial infarction improves cardiac mechanical function, reduces ventricular arrhythmias, and mitigates adverse neural remodeling in a preclinical model.
This study sought to evaluate the impact of chronic vagal nerve stimulation (cVNS) on cardiac and extracardiac neural structure/function after myocardial infarction (MI). Groups were control, MI, and MI + cVNS; cVNS was started 2 days post-MI. Terminal experiments were performed 6 weeks post-MI. MI impaired left ventricular mechanical function, evoked anisotropic electrical conduction, increased susceptibility to ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, and altered neuronal and glial phenotypes in the stellate and dorsal root ganglia, including glial activation. cVNS improved cardiac mechanical function and reduced ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation post-MI, partly by stabilizing activation/repolarization in the border zone. MI-associated extracardiac neural remodeling, particularly glial activation, was mitigated with cVNS.
Hadaya et al. (Wed,) studied this question.