[Gating properties of cardiac Na channels: from the macroscopic Na current viewpoint]

The sodium channel plays essential roles in the initiation and propagation of action potentials (APs) in excitable tissues including the heart, nerves, and muscles. Na channels in these tissues undergo so-called activation and then inactivation upon step-depolarizations of the cell membrane. Hodgkin and Huxley, early in the 1950s, proposed a mathematical model to describe such events, which was based on voltage-clamp (V-C) data on axonal membranes. However, for the next 30 years or so since the pioneering work of the above workers, electrophysiological studies of the Na channel kinetics in the heart had relied exclusively on AP data (Vmax) as an indirect measure of the Na current instead of V-C data due to difficulty in determining V-C from the complex geometry of cardiac tissues. However, recent development of an isolation procedure for preparing single heart cells and the use of single patch-pipettes for high resolution V-C experiments on these cells have made direct recording of Na channel currents also possible in the heart. Voltage-clamp studies carried out for the last decade have provided several lines of evidence supporting the view that the Na channel properties in the heart of any animal species are somehow more complex than in the axonal membrane and hence showing that Hodgkin-Huxley model can not be directly applied to describe the Na channel behavior in the former type of tissues. Here, we review recent results from V-C studies on Na channel properties with special reference to the macroscopic Na current in cardiac tissues.