Colchicine reduces incidence of atrial arrhythmias in rabbit sterile pericarditis models through anti-inflammatory and reducing expression of kir3.4 mRNA

AIM To observe the influences of colchicine on the incidence of atrial arrhythmias in rabbit sterile pericarditis models,and explore its possible mechanisms.METHODS Thirty-six healthy adult male rabbits were randomly divided into sham group,pericarditis group and colchicine treatment group(n = 12 each group).All groups were given short time high frequency stimulations,but the pericarditis group and the colchicine treatment group were used to make pericarditis models.The duration and incidence of atrial arrhythmias of each group were recorded by body surface electrocardiograms.At the end of experiment all the rabbits were killed.Right auricles of the rabbits were dyed by HE to explore if there were any inflammatory cells infiltrating,and also were used to do fluorescencequantitative PCR detections to test the expression levels of kir3.4 mRNA.RESULTS Compared with the pericarditis group,atrial arrhythmias incidence of the colchicine treatment group decreased obviously by 45.4%,and inflammatory cells infiltration rate of pericarditis group was 54.5% higher than that of the colchicine treatment group.Compared with the pericarditis group,kir3.4 mRNA expression level of the colchicine treatment group was significantly reduced(P 0.05).CONCLUSION Colchicine can reduce the incidence of atrial arrhythmias in the rabbit sterile pericarditis model.The possible mechanism is that colchicine can alleviate atrial muscle tissue inflammation reaction and reduce the expression of kir3.4 mRNA.