Your heart will beat billions of times, with incredible reliability, if you live a typical lifespan. But a handful of abnormal beats could be fatal. Steve Poelzing, a groundbreaking cardiovascular scientist, divulges the complex mechanism behind a single heartbeat, how it can go awry, and what his research is discovering about identifying conditions that can disrupt healthy heart rhythms in order to head off fatal arrythmias.
Dr. Poelzing is a professor and associate director of faculty affairs at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. He studies the processes of electrical conductivity between heart muscle cells, the proteins that connect them, and how mutations are linked to sudden cardiac death. He also studies diseases such as heart failure, ischemia, and diabetes. Poelzing's research has demonstrated that the spread of electricity across the heart, which makes it beat, is conducted not only by proteins, but also electrical fields between heart muscle cells, a phenomenon called ephaptic coupling.