You’ve probably heard someone say, “My heart skipped a beat” during an exciting or romantic moment.
But when your heart really beats irregularly, it’s no laughing matter. Atrial fibrillation, or AF, is the most common type of irregular heartbeat.
It can start as a harmless flutter but over time can become permanent. If left untreated, it becomes one of the top causes of ischemic stroke—a type of stroke that blocks blood flow to the brain.
Nicolae Moise, a research scientist at Ohio State University, is working to better understand how AF develops over time. His goal is to find ways to treat the condition before it becomes permanent. To do this, he’s using powerful supercomputers to simulate how the heart behaves in great detail. His study was recently published in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology.
In people with AF, the top chambers of the heart (called the atria) beat out of rhythm with the bottom chambers. At first, this might happen only occasionally. But if it keeps happening, the heart can adapt in ways that make it worse—and eventually lead to a permanent problem. Moise’s research is helping us understand how and why that happens.
Human experiments can’t show this level of detail over long periods, so Moise uses simulations. These virtual models allow him to study the heart’s electrical activity in 2D for up to 24 hours straight—making it the longest simulation of this kind so far.
To run these incredibly complex simulations, Moise used special computing resources provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He ran the simulations on NCSA’s Delta supercomputer and on GPUs at the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
These computers use NVIDIA graphics cards and special software (CUDA code) to perform tasks much faster than regular computers. Moise said the simulations were sped up by around 250 times. What would have taken years to calculate on a normal laptop took only a week using these machines.
What did the simulations show? When the heart starts beating too fast, the cells in the heart adjust to try and keep calcium levels stable. That’s good in the short term—but in the long term, it makes the heart more likely to keep beating abnormally.
The more this happens, the worse the condition becomes. It creates a cycle where the heart keeps adapting, but in ways that make it harder to return to normal.
This research shows why it’s so important to catch AF early and treat it properly. Moise believes these findings can help develop better medications that can prevent AF from becoming permanent.
His work also opens the door for similar research into other heart diseases, like problems with the heart’s natural pacemaker or damage caused by heart attacks.
Moise says this is the first time long-term changes in the heart caused by abnormal beats have been modeled over such long time periods. In future studies, his team plans to test potential treatments using these same simulations and confirm the results through lab experiments.
If you care about heart health, please read studies that Manganese can help clear arterial plaques and treat heart disease and Aspirin use linked to heart failure.
For more about heart health, please read studies about the blood thinner drug that can prevent strokes in people with hidden heart issues and new guidelines on daily aspirin for heart attack and stroke prevention.
The study is published in JACC Clinical Electrophysiology.
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