Cardiac pacemaker Cardiac pacemaker The contraction of cardiac muscle (heart muscle) in all animals is initiated by electrical impulses known as action potentials. The rate at which these impulses fire controls the rate of cardiac contraction, that is, the heart rate. The cells that create these rhythmic impulses, setting the pace for blood pumping, are called pacemaker cells, and they directly control the heart rate. They make up the cardiac pacemaker, that is, the natural pacemaker of the heart. In most humans, the concentration of pacemaker cells in the sinoatrial (SA) node is the natural pacemaker, and the resultant rhythm is a
Cardiac neural crest cells of heart attacks include cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure. Although CNCCs are important in embryos, some CNCCs are retained in a dormant state to adulthood where they are called "neural crest stem cells". In 2005, Tomita transplanted neural crest stem cells from mammal hearts to the neural crest of chick embryos. These CNCCs were shown to migrate into the developing heart of the chick using the same dorsolateral pathway as the CNCCs, and differentiate into neural and glial cells. Tamura's study of 2011 examined the fate of CNCCs after a heart attack (myocardial infarction) in young mice. The CNCCs in