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Circulation on the Run


Apr 8, 2019

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore.

Dr Greg Hundley:             And I'm Greg Hundley, also associate editor from VCU Health Systems, the Poly Heart Center in Richmond, Virginia.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                So arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy that will make most of us think of right ventricular disease and fatty infiltration of the muscle, but could arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy really be a bi-ventricular disease? Well you've got to stay tuned to find out more in a fantastic interview coming right up after our little coffee chat. So Greg, what are your picks this week?

Dr Greg Hundley:             My first paper is from Chris Lim at NYU in New York. And it's looking at the relationship between Mediterranean diet, air pollution and cardiovascular events.

                                                So, it's unknown whether usual individual dietary patterns can modify the association between long-term air pollution exposure and health outcomes. And so, in this large cohort with detailed diet information at the individual level, they had 548000 individuals across six states and two cities within the U.S. and a follow up period of 17 years. And that occurred between 1995 and 2011. And they evaluated whether a Mediterranean Diet modified the association between long-term exposure to ambient air pollution and then cardiovascular disease and mortality risk. And so, the average exposures to parts per billion and nitric oxide air pollution that the residential census track level were measured, and the investigators found that for the particulate matter there were elevated significant associations with cardiovascular disease. So, a hazard ratio of 1.13, ischemic heart disease similar hazard ratio and cerebrovascular disease with also a similar hazard ratio.

                                                For the nitric oxide, there were also significant associations with cardiovascular disease, as well as ischemic heart disease. And then the analysis indicated that Mediterranean diet modified the relationships. Those with a higher Mediterranean diet score had significantly lower rates of air pollution related mortality. These results therefore indicate Carolyn, that Mediterranean diet reduce cardiovascular disease mortality related to long-term exposure to air pollutants in a large perspective, U.S. cohort. Can you believe increased consumption of foods rich in antioxidant compounds actually may aid in reducing the considerable disease burden associated with ambient air pollution?

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Oh wow. That is hugely interesting. Gosh, what do we do about this clinically now?

 Dr Greg Hundley:            Remember, first of all, this is an associate study, so we can't infer cause effect. And what we need next are some more independent studies from other cities around the world, prospective cohorts, examinations of clinical outcomes and randomize interventions. And so, I think the results add to a growing body of literature suggesting that dietary patterns may help reduce cardiovascular events in these high air pollution exposure areas. And how does this work? Well, potentially through augmenting antioxidants and reducing oxidative stress.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                That's really cool. So from one region, talking about air pollution to another region that often reports about air pollution and that's China. But this study from China is actually the largest registry study to evaluate sex related differences and hospital management and outcomes of patients with acute coronary syndrome in China.

                                                This is from corresponding author Dr Zhao from Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood Vessel Disease. With colleagues of the improving care for cardiovascular disease in China, Acute Coronary Syndrome project, which is an ongoing nationwide registry of the American Heart Association and the Chinese Society of Cardiology. So, the authors use data from this project and evaluate at sex differences in the acute management, medical therapies for secondary prevention and in hospital mortality in more than 82000 patients admitted for acute coronary syndrome in 192 hospitals across China from 2014 to 2018.

Dr Greg Hundley:             What did they show in this study?

Dr Carolyn Lam:                They showed that women hospitalized for acute coronary syndrome in China less frequently received acute treatments and strategies for secondary prevention and had a higher in hospital mortality rate than men. Now the observed sex differences in this in hospital mortality were likely due to older age, worse clinical profiles and fewer evidence base acute treatments provided to women. And that's because the sex differences were no longer observed after adjustment for these clinical characteristics and acute treatments.

                                                What this all means though is specifically targeted quality improvement programs may be warranted to narrow these sex related disparities in patients with acute coronary syndrome in China.

 Dr Greg Hundley:            Very interesting. I'm going to take sort of the next paper and it's looking at a different aspect of acute myocardial infarction. And these papers from Yong Wang from the Division of Molecular and Translational Cardiology at Hannover Medical School in Hanover, Germany.

                                                Now as we know, the heart can undergo deleterious changes and left ventricular geometry and function during that vulnerable period before scar formation has stabilized the infarct area. And so inflammatory cell trafficking from hematopoietic organs like the spleen to sites of tissue injury is coordinated by chemokine chemokine receptor networks. Therapeutically modulating these chemokine chemokine receptor interactions may promote infarct healing by limiting excessive inflammation induced tissue damage or by enhancing the recruitment of angiogenic cell populations to the infarct or the wound. Inflammatory cell trafficking after a myocardial infarction is controlled by a CXC motif chemokine ligand 12 or CXCL12 and its receptor CXC motif chemokine receptor 4. CXC receptor 4 antagonists, mobilize inflammatory cells and promote infarct repair. But the cellular mechanisms are unclear.

                                                So, what do these investigators do? In mouse models, the investigators found that inflammatory cell trafficking between a hematopoietic organs and sites of tissue injury is controlled by CXCL12 and its receptor CXC receptor 4. And bolus injectives of a highly selected peptidic macrocycles CXC receptor 4 antagonist, enhanced tissue repair and functional recovery after re-perfused acute myocardial infarction in mice. And interestingly, the therapeutic effects require a dendritic cell priming and we're specifically mediated by t-regulator cells. Intermittent CXC R4 blockade mobilized the t-regulator cells from their splenic reservoir. Leading to their enhanced recruitment to the infarct region.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                So bring it home for us, Greg. What does this mean clinically for MI management in humans?

Dr Greg Hundley:             Right. Highlighting the translational potential. What we might infer is that CXC receptor 4 blockade reduces infarct volume and improved systolic function in a porcine close chest model of re-perfuse acute myocardial infarction.

                                                And so, the results of both the mouse experiments and this sort of translational model in pigs should stimulate further research into therapeutic potential of CXC R4 blockade after MI and in other acute conditions were excessive, innate or adaptive immune responses cause immunopathology.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Fascinating. So from one preclinical paper to another, but this time focused on heart failure. And focus specifically on titin. Titin is this giant elastic protein that spans the half-sarcomere from the Z-disk to the M band, and it acts like a molecular spring and a mechanosensor that has been linked to striated muscle disease. Now the pathways that govern tight independent cardiac growth and contribute to disease are diverse and have been really difficult to dissect. And so corresponding author Dr Gotthardt, from Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine and the German Center for Cardiovascular Research and his colleagues aimed to study titin deficiency versus titin dysfunction.

                                                And how they did that is they generated and compared striatum muscles specific knockouts with progressive postnatal loss of the complete titin protein. And that's by removing Exxon 2. Or an M-band truncation that eliminates the proper structure and integration, but retains all the other functional domains. So they then evaluated cardiac function, cardiomyocytes mechanics, and the molecular basis of the phenotype. Now, what they found was that progressive depletion of titin led to sarcomere disassembly an atrophy in striated muscle. And in the complete knockout, remaining titin molecules had increased strain resulting in mechanically induce trophic signaling and eventual dilated cardiomyopathy.

                                                On the other hand, the truncated titin helped maintain passive properties and thus reduced mechanically and do signaling. In other words, truncations versus loss of titin, differentially affected cardiac pathology with atrophy versus dilated cardiomyopathy respectively. And together, these findings really contribute to the molecular understanding of why titin mutations differentially affect cardiac growth and have implications importantly for genotype, phenotype relations that support a personalized approach to the diverse titinopathy.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Interesting, Carolyn. All this information on titin. So why is it clinically important?

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Well, first of all, tightened mutations are the most common genetic basis of heart disease and the findings are clinically relevant, as I said, for understanding the genotype phenotype relations at the Titin mutation. But understanding the integration of Titin based signaling and sarcomere biology could indeed help personalize diagnostics by improved clinical decisions and maybe identify suitable therapeutic targets for these titinopathy. But that of course requires much further work. Well that brings us to the end of our summaries. Let's go to our feature discussion.

 Dr Greg Hundley:            Welcome everyone to our second segment of our program. We're discussing an interesting paper today entitled Sudden Death and Left Ventricular Involvement in Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy. And we want to welcome our coauthors Elijah Behr and Mary Sheppard from St George's University in London. And also, our own associate editor, Sami Viskin to discuss this paper. Mary, can you tell us a little bit about your study design here, the population and the hypothesis and some of your results?

Dr Mary Sheppard:          I am a cardiac pathologist of 20 years and I have a special interest in sudden death. Over this time, I've established a national pathology database, where pathologists throughout the country when they have a sudden death, which is likely cardiac and non-ischemic, they will send the heart or tissue blocks insides to me for my opinion concerning the death. We have as a result developed a large number, over 5200 cases which has now built up to 6000. It's the largest pathological series in the world.

                                                And I was also discovering the pathologists were either under or over diagnosing all types of cardiomyopathy but particularly ergogenic cardiomyopathy. And that is why with Chris Miles, our research fellow, we looked in detail at what I had diagnosed, or the pathologist as ergogenic cardiomyopathy and we actually honed are pathological diagnostic criteria for this very important entity. Establishing that left ventricular is five and ventricular and left and ventricular is the norm almost. That right or left ventricular is unusual by themselves and even in 20%, one in five, the heart can look macroscopically normal. So that histology is essential when you're making this diagnosis. You cannot make the diagnosis pathologically without histologically examining the heart.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Very good, Mary. And did you also examine some genetic markers in some of the subsets of the patients? And how did you decide who those individuals would be that received the genetic analysis?

Dr Mary Sheppard:          A small subset and I will hand over to Elijah Behr, my colleague concerning that.

Dr Elijah Behr:                   The genetic tissue is only available in a minority of cases. We've developed a pipeline now with the referring pathologists who are increasingly they're sending samples of spleen suitable for DNA extraction that allow us then to do a retrospective postmortem genetic testing or molecular autopsy. But unfortunately, in this particular series we only had a small proportion. I think there were roughly about 24 out of the 202 cases, so just over ten percent. And interestingly, while we didn't necessarily mirror the expected yield of genetic testing that is seen in clinical cases, where you may see about 40% carrying pathogenic variance. We certainly picked up some important pathogenic variance, particularly those that are often associated with highly penetrant and more severe disease. In particular TMEM43 and desmoplakin. These findings may reflect the small size of the sample, but it also may reflect where the greatest risk for sudden death from ergogenic cardiomyopathy lies.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Elijah, getting back to some of the patients that experienced the sudden death in the study population Mary was referring to, were there characteristics that were associated with the sudden death? For example, those that might be related to gender or activity?

Dr Elijah Behr:                   So the majority of the cases were male. The majority has never had prior symptoms. These were unheralded deaths. The majority did not have a family history and I think the majority were addressed, but those that were athletes, we're much more likely to have died during exertion. So as we found with ergogenic cardiomyopathy in general and exertion is a trigger to sudden death. The risk was higher and compared to the athletes in death during exertion was associated with being younger as well. I think exertion and sports clearly play a role in ergogenic cardiomyopathy. It didn't appear to play a role in whether there was left ventricular involvement or not, but certainly a role at more severe presentation.

 Dr Greg Hundley:            Maybe both Mary and Elijah answering this. You found histopathological evidence of fibrosis and fatty infiltration. How extensive was that? And do you think that could be identified with a test like maybe magnetic resonance imaging?

Dr Mary Sheppard:          Yes. Our diagnostic criteria which is illustrated in the addendum is that it was at least two blocks of tissue. We always look at 10 to 12 to 15 blocks of tissue from both right and left ventricle. And at least two of the blocks had to have fibrosis with fat in 20% of the area examined. We did not include inflammation because inflammation is, an important histological criterion in our experience. We were very precise about that because you need that much at least to make the diagnosis. A little bit of fibrosis or a little bit of fat is not sufficient by itself.

Dr Greg Hundley:             When you mention a block, for us clinically, how much myocardium would that be? For example, on an imaging test like an echo or an MRI scan.

Dr Mary Sheppard:          One to two centimeters squared.

Dr Greg Hundley:             So quite a bit.

Dr Elijah Behr:                   You're looking at probably around two to four millimeters of potential depth of fibrosis. And what we've seen clinically in LV involvement of MRI scans is miss two epicardial late enhancement. Now the question is whether our scans are sensitive enough to pick that up? Given the technology available or a sense to the histopathology and I think that's why maybe some of the clinical studies have tended to miss the true proportion of left ventricular involvement. Because of the relative subtlety of the fibrosis compared to the technological ability to discriminate it. I mean certainly when you look at our cases that were diagnosed previously with cardiomyopathy, either they were arrhythmogenic or dilated, many did have imaging findings if MRI was performed, that would indicate or suggest some left ventricular involvement. But as you know, the task force criteria for arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy having very much right ventricular focus. An LV imaging findings and LV ECG findings are just not part of those at the moment.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Was there a particular location within the heart where there was a predilection toward the findings of fibrosis and fat?

Dr Mary Sheppard:          In the posterior basal wall particularly, transmural involves going from the epicardium to the sub endocardium and also the interior walls of the left ventricular were the predilection areas.

Dr Elijah Behr:                   I think that's what we see on our MRI scans as well. When you look at these patients, that posterior basal area, is the one that tends to light up the most.

Dr Mary Sheppard:          It is believed that increased stress in that area gives more damage because of the stretching away from the septum.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Very interesting. So Elijah, you had mentioned task force criteria. I want to shift to Sami now and ask, Sami, can you help us put this in perspective relative to the existing task force criteria and then the findings in this study? And how that could lead to subsequent changes down the road?

 Dr Sami Viskin:                 Okay, so it is difficult to place this in the context of the task force because mentioned by Elijah, the taskforce are focused on a disease that is believed to be in the right ventricle. And the study shows that many of the sudden death cases will involve the left ventricle. One of the most important messages of this paper is importance of her forensic examination. And importance of making it for anything examination in the center of expertise. We know of patients that will travel a thousand miles to undergo surgery or an ablation procedure, but families do not think that way when there is casualty or family dies. You may take a postmortem as a given, but in many countries, including my own, most cases of sudden death would not be followed by a post mortem and will not go into center of expertise. And you cannot overemphasize the importance of doing that because then you have to know what you are looking for in the remaining relatives is extremely important.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Very good. How about from the perspective as an electrophysiologist? Does this impact in any way how you might evaluate a younger person with syncope?

Dr Sami Viskin:                  Well, it is difficult to conclude from this paper about how to evaluate patients with syncope because most of the cases in this series don't have symptoms at all. But this paper calls to very interesting investigations by Mario del Mar and others in New York. Looking about the electrophysiology consequences of a disease like right ventricle are like a bit mechanical in [inaudible 00:21:58] The tissues becomes editing the disease, the electrical properties how the patients in brugada can cause malfunction of this sodium channel and create a disease that is more like brugada and dysplasia at the beginning. So, the entire correlation between a morphologic disease and the metrical disease and we used to think they are two different things. And now we see that we can actually put them together and you can go through stages where one disease is before an electrical disease and only at later stages it becomes a morphological evident disease.

 Dr Greg Hundley:            A fantastic discussion on pathologic findings. Sami making the point that certainly in cases for young individuals having a postmortem examination performed at centers that have expertise such as what Mary's described, can be very important. And then Elijah, helping us to understand with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, number one, findings are not, we shouldn't just be thinking about the right ventricle in isolation, but also the left ventricle. Fibro fatty infiltration, particularly in the posterior basal wall could be an important thing to look for, for those that are performing the magnetic resonance imaging exams. And then lastly, many of the patients in the study like this, the first presentation was of sudden death. And we need to be cognizant that this condition could be prevalent in the population and not necessarily appreciated by some of our current task force guidelines and examinations. So, what an outstanding discussion. And I think for today, we want to thank our authors and our associate editor and wish everyone a great week.

                                                On behalf of Carolyn and myself, we look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you very much.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                This program is copyright American Heart Association 2019.