Atrial Fibrillation

The LEGACY study found that obese people who lost more than 10% of body weight and maintained that loss had a six-fold reduction in arrhythmia recurrence over 4 years. In AF patients, only potassium-sparing diuretics were associated with reduced stroke recurrence. Among patients with atrial fibrillation without contraindications, 72.0% were prescribed an anticoagulant. Maintaining more than 10% weight reduction was associated with reduced left atrial volume, left ventricular end-diastolic diameter, and interventricular septal thickness. Atrial fibrillation or flutter had a multimorbidity co-occurrence rate of 94% in this cohort. Valvular AF was strongly associated with multimorbidity, with 94.8% of multimorbidity patients having VAF compared to only 10.8% in the oligomorbidity group. Valvular AF was defined by moderate-to-severe rheumatic mitral stenosis or a mechanical prosthetic valve; all other cases were classified as non-valvular AF. The STROKE AF trial reported three-year atrial fibrillation detection yields of 21.7% for ICM and 2.4% for standard of care. Cardioversion is effective at terminating atrial fibrillation acutely but is not curative, as the underlying substrate re…