title: Emerging antiarrhythmic agents: a personal view from the Far East.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Arrhythmia treatments today take three different approaches. One uses electronic devices, such as electronic pacemakers or defibrillators, and this is regarded as life-saving in cases of bradyarrhythmias and ventricular fibrillation. Another is the ablation technique which eliminates abnormal pacemakers and/or conductive pathways by applying thermal or cryo-injury to pathological portions of the heart. The most classical one is the antiarrhythmic drugs, but are they effective and safe?
  
  
  METHODS
  Recent development of the understanding of arrhythmias, cardiac ionic channels and antiarrhythmic drugs covered by papers mostly published after 2000 are discussed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The market size of the antiarrhythmic drugs is small, but various multichannel acting drugs may become candidates as antiarrhythmic drugs. As the cardiac ionic channels have become recognized as proteins, the molecular target for antiarrhythmic drugs has become apparent, but at the same time accurate data on clinical effectiveness and safety are required for drug approval; thus, few atrium selective drugs, such as IKur, IKACh and IKAde blocking drugs and amiodarone-like multichannel acting drugs are being developed.
authors.affiliation: Yokohama College of Pharmacy, 601 Matano-cho, Totsuka-ku, Yokohama, 245-0066, Japan. keitaroh@yamanashi.ac.jp
authors.forename: Keitaro
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hashimoto
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000889:Anti-Arrhythmia Agents / Q000008:administration & dosage / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D001145:Arrhythmias, Cardiac / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000378:metabolism; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D005202:Asia, Eastern; D006801:Humans; D007473:Ion Channels / Q000378:metabolism; D008389:Marketing of Health Services
chemical_list: D000889:Anti-Arrhythmia Agents; D007473:Ion Channels