Review of Genetic Changes and Factors Causing Cardiac Arrhythmias

Cardiovascular diseases are currently the leading cause of death in the world. Arrhythmias are one of the most common cardiovascular diseases. In arrhythmia, the heartbeat becomes slow, fast, or irregular, which affects the efficiency of the heart, and in this case, the heart may not have enough ability to pump blood. Cardiac arrhythmias are the leading causes of sudden cardiac death in young people, affecting even patients with anatomically normal hearts. Arrhythmia syndromes are ion channel diseases that lead to abnormal electrical properties of the heart. This article examined the genetic causes affecting all types of cardiac arrhythmias. A detailed search was performed on Google Scholar and PubMed to identify research articles related to arrhythmia genetics. All duplicate articles based on the title and articles published before the year 2000 were removed during the screening. Finally, after several rounds of content review of the articles, 50 research articles were selected for this study.

It has been found that mutations cause arrhythmias in nuclear genes encoding membrane channels in heart muscle cells. However, the causes of some cases of arrhythmia are unclear and the possibility of multifactorial of these cardiac disorders is raised. The importance of this type of review article, while revealing the relationship between gene loci and types of arrhythmogenic syndromes, is to provide a molecular basis that can provide researchers with new diagnostic methods in addition to echocardiogram.