Vulnerability to ventricular fibrillation.

One of the factors that favors the development of ventricular fibrillation is an increase in the dispersion of refractoriness. Experiments will be described in which an increase in dispersion in the recovery of excitability was determined during brief episodes of enhanced sympathetic nerve activity, known to increase the risk of fibrillation. Whereas in the normal heart ventricular fibrillation can be induced by a strong electrical shock, a premature stimulus of moderate intensity only induces fibrillation in the presence of regional ischemia, which greatly increases the dispersion of refractoriness. One factor that is of importance for the transition of reentrant ventricular tachycardia to ventricular fibrillation during acute regional ischemia is the subendocardial Purkinje system. After selective destruction of the Purkinje network by lugol, reentrant tachycardias still develop in the ischemic region, but they do not degenerate into fibrillation. Finally, attempts were made to determine the minimal mass of thin ventricular myocardium required to sustain fibrillation induced by burst pacing. This was done by freezing of subendocardial and midmural layers. The rim of surviving epicardial muscle had to be larger than 20 g. Extracellular electrograms during fibrillation in both the intact and the "frozen" left ventricle were indistinguishable, but activation patterns were markedly different. In the intact ventricle epicardial activation was compatible with multiple wavelet reentry, in the "frozen" heart a single, or at most two wandering reentrant waves were seen. (c) 1998 American Institute of Physics.