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Award Recognizes Decades of Leadership by Arthur Mos

Arthur Moss, M.D., professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, has won the Golden Lionel Award, which is awarded every two years at the International Workshop on Cardiac Arrhythmias, which began today in Venice. The conference organizing committee grants the award to recognize "eminent authority in the field of arrhythmology.”

Moss attended Yale as an undergraduate then Harvard Medical School. He interned at Massachusetts General Hospital and finished his residency in Rochester, where he also did a fellowship in cardiology. Since his first publication in 1960, he has published over 500 scientific papers, books, chapters, and editorials. Many of the publications focused on cardiac arrhythmias, electrical malfunctions that can throw the heartbeat out of rhythm, and stop it in the worst cases.

Arrhythmias cause many sudden cardiac deaths each year in the United States. Most fatal arrhythmias occur in aging patients when scar tissue left by a heart attack interferes with the heart's electrical system. As many as 1,000 deaths each year, however, are caused by Long QT Syndrome (LQTS). LQTS occurs mostly in teens with otherwise healthy hearts. While rare, LQTS is yielding insights into the much more common post-heart attack arrhythmias.

The QT interval is part of the heart’s electrical signature as recorded by an electrocardiogram (ECG). It represents the time it takes for the heart’s lower chambers to “reset” electrically after each heartbeat. In LQTS patients, QT reset time is prolonged, which makes the heart more susceptible to fatal arrhythmias. As a result of work led by Moss over more than two decades, researchers have achieved an 80 percent reduction in life-threatening LQTS events via drug treatment (e.g. beta blockers) and device advances. In April of last year, Moss’ team won a four-year, $2.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue its study of Long QT syndrome into its 24th year.

In addition, Moss has spearheaded the research that led to the use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), which shock the heart back into proper rhythm when they sense an arrhythmia. ICDs have been used more widely since studies found that the devices could reduce sudden death in heart attack survivors. Led by Moss, the 2002 MADIT II study (Multicenter Automatic Defibrillator Implantation Trial II) in particular changed medical guidelines nationwide and made a hundred thousand heart attack survivors eligible for ICD therapy.  

Source: University of Rochester Medical Center

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