Animal models of cardiac arrhythmias

Time for primary review 42 days. When surveying the literature with the intention of evaluating to which extent studies on animal models have contributed to the understanding of arrhythmia mechanisms in patients and in devising therapeutic strategies, one is struck by the differences between supraventricular and ventricular arrhythmias. In general, in the field of supraventricular arrhythmias there has been a strong interaction between experimental and clinical studies and there can be no doubt that the various animal models have been instrumental in understanding the mechanisms of clinical arrhythmias and in establishing different forms of therapy. Clearly, an animal cannot be transformed into a human patient, but despite species differences and differences in arrhythmogenic factors in animal models and humans, the similarity between arrhythmia mechanisms in experimental models and patients far outweigh the differences. This similarity is less evident when considering ventricular arrhythmias. There are several reasons for this. First, many ventricular arrhythmias, such as those induced by acute ischaemia, cannot be studied in human patients because they occur unpredictably in situations where electrophysiological changes may develop within minutes. Second, even when in patients acute ischaemia is the trigger for arrhythmias, many other factors may influence arrhythmogenesis, such as the presence of a healed infarct, hypertrophy, dilatation, electrolyte disturbances or heart failure. Third, many factors determine whether, and if so, how often ventricular arrhythmias occur in the setting of acute ischaemia and/or a chronic myocardial infarction, and in experimental models usually only a single factor is taken into account. Still, the knowledge of arrhythmogenic mechanisms derived from animal studies has greatly contributed to the development of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. ### 2.1 Re-entrant tachycardias in the presence of accessory atrioventricular pathways The history of these arrhythmias is rather bizarre because animal studies provided the basic arrhythmia mechanisms long before the syndrome was clinically recognized, because from 1967 onwards clinical studies unravelled in … * Corresponding author.