Sanjiv M. Narayan, MD, PhD, is a professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University in California, where he researches bioengineering techniques for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. A former professor of medicine at UC San Diego, cardiologist Sanjiv Narayan is a member of several other research teams as well, focused on advancing understanding of atrial fibrillation (AF).One such team published a study in Pacing and Clinical Electrophysiology, a peer-reviewed journal, entitled, “Comparison of phase mapping and electrogram-based driver mapping for catheter ablation in atrial fibrillation.” Ablation is a procedure that scars or destroys the heart tissue that allows incorrect electrical signals to be sent to the heart and cause atrial fibrillation. After studying 175 articles in the PubMed database, the researchers concluded that one specific method of ablation (driver-guided) showed better outcomes than standard ablation therapies. Additionally, the researchers found that phase mapping is better for guiding ablation than electrogram-based mapping. This supports many studies of AF driver based ablation by many techniques.
An accomplished educator and researcher, Dr. Sanjiv M. Narayan serves as a professor of medicine and the director of the Stanford Arrhythmia Center. Dr. Sanjiv Narayan has studied numerous aspects of atrial fibrillation (AF), including ablation of AF drivers and its clinical implications. Pulmonary vein isolation, or PVI, is a procedure used to stop abnormal electrical signals in the heart that cause atrial fibrillation. PVI as a treatment for AF has been met with less-than-optimal outcomes, however, and the impact of adding lesion sets--additional surgical treatments for AF--has yet to be adequately explored. Some recent studies suggest that AF driver ablation, through which doctors intentionally scar tissues by sending irregular electric signals to the heart, may be a preferable treatment option to couple with PVI, but others suggest otherwise. In an effort to gain a clearer perspective, Dr. Narayan and a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of all the literature on the subject.The research team found that supplementing PVI treatment with AF driver ablation may be an option to improve patient outcomes, with several studies supporting this approach using several techniques. They suggest randomized clinical trials conducted at different research centers to study the treatment in further detail.
