Winter is almost here

Dhanunjaya Lakkireddy MD, Andrea Natale MD


Dear colleagues

Greetings from the editorial desk. Hope you had a wonderful Thanks Giving Weekend with your family. November brings a lot of wonderful things. Great beers of Ocktoberfest, pumpkin spice lattes, Black Friday and many other exciting preludes to the Holiday season. We assume each one of you had the chance to enjoy these little pleasures of life.

This November edition also brings to a conclusion of the Venice Arrhythmia 2015. Attended by more than 1300 delegates it stands one of the best organized and well received heart rhythm symposium in Europe. Besides the grand setting of the canals of Venice, the quality of the program and the speakers makes it a truly popular meeting in the international space. Our special congratulations to the organizers. This also marks the completion of the Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Symposium held in Melbourne, Australia. This annual regional meeting provides a great forum for the heart rhythm specialists in greater Asia Pacific. The abstract session was particularly more exciting. This is an area that seems to have made some significant strides. This relatively young society has been able to pull off a major show.

Markus Stuhlinger and colleagues from Austria presented a first in man Cryoloop circular catheter ablation experience. This innovative study opens up new ideas and applications of variations of the existing catheter platforms and energy systems. Tayebjee and colleagues presented the development of a novel scoring system that determines the success of Atrial Fibrillation ablation as part of cardiac surgery. This scoring system opens a new avenues for the assessment of success and better clinical care. This needs to be validated in larger cohorts of patients. EJ Davies etal presented on the late electrophysiologic consequences of posterior wall isolation during AF ablation. Even though a small cohort it presents a very clear view of the impact of completer posterior wall isolation on the inducibility of atrial arrhythmias. J Chung and group present their experience on variations in anticoagulation management after a successful MAZE procedure. This is an area of great ambiguity and we really have not arrived at a proper clinical recommendation or a guideline yet.

We have some exciting science presented in this issue of the Journal. Lidia Papavasileiou and group present an interesting case series on sudden cardiac death in post transaortic valve replacement. This raises a lot of pathophysiologic issues that we currently don’t understand in this subset of patients. Rogers etal describe the potential use of a combination subcutaneous defibrillator with cardiac contractility modulation in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and a narrow QRS complex. Several nice and comprehensive review articles on a wide variety of topics including – better lesion creation during arrhythmia ablation, hemodynamic changes related to cardiac pacing, atrio esophageal fistula, coagulation testing for novel oral coagulants, discrepancies in ICD implantation, magnetic navigation system in AF ablation, using magnetic resonance imaging in AF ablation and lariat left atrial appendage closure system.

We wish you a great holiday season and a warm winter.

Best regards




Dhanunjaya (DJ)Lakkireddy MD, FACC, FHRS Associate Editor JAFIB



Andrea Natale MD, FACC, FHRS, FESC Editor-in-Chief JAFIB