Today I wanted to do a video on the subject of atrial fibrillation.
Many people with atrial fibrillation are young, dont have any comorbidities and go in and out of atrial fibrillation. And when they go into atrial fibrillation they seem to tolerate it very poorly. They feel yuck...tired, dizzy and it is just absolutely horrible. Some of them come out of it by themelesves and some need medications or an electrical shock treatment to get them out of it and for many such patients, their biggest anxiety is will my atrial fibrillation progress i.e. will it become permanent so that I am constantly in it and will that mean the end for any quality of life I have… So I thought I'd do a video on this very subject. There is a very interesting paper by Jahangir et al published in the circulation journal in 2007. The paper is entitled "Long term progression and outcomes with raging in patients with lone atrial fibrillation" and it is a 30 year follow-up study. Here they identified 76 patients with lone AF. These patients were all less than 60 years of age and had no other comorbidities i.e they were otherwise completely healthy. Of these 76 patients, 34 had paroxysmal and 37 had persistent AF. 5 had permanent AF and therefore they were excluded. The mean age was 44 years. And these guys followed them up for 30 years to see what happened to these patients.