Atrial fibrillation in otherwise healthy middle-aged women places them at an increased risk of death, a new study shows.
Atrial fibrillation is a type of heart rhythm problem where the two small upper chambers of the heart, called the atria, quiver instead of beating regularly. This results in blood not being pumped efficiently through the heart, causing possible clots.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researcher David Conen, MD, MPH, and assistant professor of internal medicine at University Hospital, Basel, Switzerland, told WebMD that although many studies have found older people with atrial fibrillation have a higher risk of dying, no studies assessed the risk the disease runs on middle-aged women.
"This large group [of middle-age people] was generally believed to have a benign outcome," he says. "We now show that [younger] participants with new-onset atrial fibrillation had an approximately twofold increased risk of death compared to women without new-onset atrial fibrillation."
After other cardiovascular risk factors were accounted for, about 2.1% of all deaths could be blamed on the abnormal heart rhythm.
Teresa S.M. Tang, MD, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia and the co-author of an editorial that accompanied the study notes that "Atrial fibrillation is not benign."
