Cardiac telocytes. From basic science to cardiac diseases. I. Atrial fibrillation

Publication date: Available online 12 April 2018
Source:Annals of Anatomy - Anatomischer Anzeiger
Author(s): Sorin Hostiuc, Ionuț Negoi, Catalin Dogaroiu, Eduard Drima, Cristian Bogdan Iancu
IntroductionAtrial fibrillation (AF) is nowadays considered to be one of the most important causes of heart failure, stroke, cognitive decline, vascular dementia, sudden death and overall cardiovascular morbidity. Recently were published a few articles suggesting a possible involvement of telocytes in the development of atrial fibrillation. The purpose of this article is to analyze the results obtained in the field systematically, and to see if there is enough data to support a possible involvement of telocytes in arrhythmogenesis.Materials and methodsTo this end, we performed a systematic review of the relevant scientific literature, indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus.Results and discussionsOur systematic review of the published data identified five articles containing original data, based on which the association between telocytes and atrial fibrillation was inferred in later studies. We analyzed the usefulness of the information contained in the original articles to support this association, showing a lack of definite proofs correlating telocytes with atrial fibrillation.ConclusionsEven if a few articles implied a potential association between AF and telocytes, the current data is not enough to support it. Moreover, even an association between the morphology, characteristics, or density of the telocytes in the atrium/pulmonary veins and AF is potentially speculative, and more studies should be performed before implying it with a reasonable degree of certainty.



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