2008 Congress Bulletin, Issue 11

Tuesday, October 28, 2008
11:00 - 12:30

Dr. Hein J. Wellens studied medicine at the University of Leiden. By developing methods to initiate and terminate cardiac arrhythmias in the intact human heart, he can be considered a founding father of modern clinical arrhythmology.

In the late sixties, working at the University Hospital of Amsterdam, as a pupil of Professor Durrer he started to investigate patients with cardiac arrhythmias by placing catheters into the heart allowing the recording of cardiac activation times at different sites of the heart. By connecting these catheters to a pacing device, he showed that it was possible to initiate and terminate the clinically occurring cardiac arrhythmias to localize the site of origin of the arrhythmia and to discover its mechanism. By using this approach, called programmed electrical stimulation of the heart, Dr. Wellens not only unraveled mechanisms and localization of arrhythmias in the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, but also in the other types of supra ventricular tachycardia. His book, published in 1971, rapidly became the bible for a new subspecialty in cardiology called clinical electrophysiology.

In the early seventies, a major breakthrough came when he showed that programmed electrical stimulation of the heart could also be used to study the mechanism and localization of ventricular tachycardia opening new ways for its treatment.

In 1973 Dr. Wellens was appointed Professor of Cardiology at the University of Amsterdam. During that time it became clear that this new approach allowed the investigation of the effect of drugs on the tachycardia mechanism and the development of new therapeutic strategies such as the termination of tachycardias by specially designed pacemakers, the surgical removal or isolation of the tachycardia substrate and ultimately cure from cardiac arrhythmias by catheter ablation. The work of Dr. Wellens has not only been the basis for the way arrhythmias are currently investigated and treated, but by carefully analyzing electrocardiographic recordings in relation to information from programmed stimulation of the heart, he opened new ways to use the electrocardiogram as a reliable (non-invasive) source to become informed about the site of origin of an arrhythmia and the best treatment.

Dr. Wellens left Amsterdam in 1977 to become Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiology at the Academic Hospital of the new Maastricht University. There he created his school of arrhythmology, educating more than 130 cardiologists, between 1977-2001, from all over the world. Many who after returning to their home country became internationally known leaders in cardiology.

Dr. Wellens, who also directed from 1993 to 2003 the Interuniversity Cardiological Institute of the Netherlands (ICIN), an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences where Dutch research activities in cardiovascular research are combined at the national level, wrote or co-authored over 560 peer-reviewed articles, 252 chapters in books, and was author or (co) editor of 19 books on cardiology. For 11 years (1993-2004) he was Associate Editor of Circulation, the most important international cardiology journal. He is highly respected among his colleagues and is a member or honorary member of 16 international cardiac societies.