Mathematics of a heart beat
1 Mar 2012 by Evoluted New Media
A new mathematical model that looks at the calcium activity within the atrial heart cell could significantly improve our chances of treating heart disease and stroke.
Each heartbeat is a coordinated action of more than a billion muscle cells. Most of the time, only the muscles on the larger heart chambers contract and relax, but if the heart needs to work harder – for example during exercise – it relies on the back-up from the atrial muscles within the smaller chambers, known as the atrial kick.
These high performance cells rely on specific concentrations of cellular calcium, and scientists from the University of Nottingham have produced a mathematical model of calcium activity within atrial heart cells.
“This new model provides clinically relevant insights into the initiation and propagation of sub-cellular signals,” said Dr Rüdiger Thul, a lecturer in applied mathematics. “For the first time we can manipulate cellular properties throughout a whole atrial muscle cell in order to deduce which concentrations give rise to abnormalities.”
Thul says this has the potential to point to new treatments for heart disease and irregular heart beat – such as atrial fibrillation – which can lead to thrombosis and stroke. They model is key to understanding these, as current state-of-the-art experimental technology is not able to make any breakthroughs.
“The strength of our model is that we can study the intracellular calcium concentration throughout the whole volume of the atrial muscle cell at the same time,” said Thul. “This allows for detailed exploration of the spatio-temporal calcium patterns associated with both healthy and pathological conditions.”
Several experimental studies have shown that to trigger contraction in atrial muscles, the calcium concentrations follows an elaborate choreography which shows different concentration values in different parts of the cell. This is in contrast to ventricular cells where calcium concentration is almost entirely uniform throughout the cell.
