Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Neurocardiology is a rapidly progressing scientific and clinical field which shows significant promise in the prevention and treatment of arrhythmias 1 .Computational modeling has been a backbone technique in the study of arrhythmia mechanisms since the 1960s, with the natural evolution toward multi-scale models 2,3 spanning from the molecular cell to the whole heart to the population level.Despite this explosion in cardiac computational modeling fueled by advances in processing power, computational models of neurocardiology remain limited, likely due to the complexity and interplay between numerous feedback mechanisms involved.Prior studies modeled how the cardiac autonomic nervous system (ANS) influences high-level cardiac physiology 4,5 but models directly linking the cardiac ANS to cardiac electrophysiology are lacking.In this issue of J. Physiology, Yang et al. present a novel model of neurocardiology that is not only multi-scale but also multi-disciplinary.This approach differs from prior studies which typically only model the downstream effects of sympathetic and parasympathetic modulation on cardiac myocytes, with pre-specified changes in heart rate, ion channel expression, calcium cycling.In this study, the authors directly simulate both neuronal and cardiac electrophysiology simultaneously.The neuronal electrophysiology models 6 for the sympathetic and parasympathetic cardiac nervous system are directly coupled to cardiac electrophysiology models incorporating both sinoatrial node (SAN) 7 and ventricular myocyte models 8,9 .The advantage of such an approach is that the inputs modulating the myocyte models are dynamically derived during each time point in the simulation instead of being pre-set by the modeler, which may allow for richer emergent and potentially more physiological behaviors.Building the cardiac ANS model alone is a significant contribution.The authors base their ANS model on prior descriptions in the literature 1,4,5,10 to reproduce the multiple distinct networks of cardiac control consisting of 3 layers: the central nervous system (CNS), intrathoracic nervous system (ITNS), and the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICNS), which is further broken down into 2 sub-networks (the sympathetic S-ICNS and
Source: The Journal of Physiology
DOI: 10.1113/jp285309
Authors: Michael B. Liu, Olujimi A. Ajijola
Institutions: Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles
Language: English
Subfield: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4385514964