• Marco Proietti, Marco Vitolo, Stephanie L Harrison, Deirdre A Lane, Laurent Fauchier, Francisco Marin, Michael Nabauer, Tatjana S Potpara, Gheorghe-Andrei Dan, Giuseppe Boriani, LipGregory Y HGYHLiverpool Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Liverpool and Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, Liverpool, UK. gregory.lip@liverpool.ac.uk.Clinical and Experimental Medicine PhD Program, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, , and ESC-EHRA EORP-AF Long-Term General Registry Investigators.
• Liverpool Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Liverpool and Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, Liverpool, UK. marco.proietti@unimi.it.
• Bmc Med. 2021 Oct 20; 19 (1): 256.

BackgroundEpidemiological studies in atrial fibrillation (AF) illustrate that clinical complexity increase the risk of major adverse outcomes. We aimed to describe European AF patients' clinical phenotypes and analyse the differential clinical course.MethodsWe performed a hierarchical cluster analysis based on Ward's Method and Squared Euclidean Distance using 22 clinical binary variables, identifying the optimal number of clusters. We investigated differences in clinical management, use of healthcare resources and outcomes in a cohort of European AF patients from a Europe-wide observational registry.ResultsA total of 9363 were available for this analysis. We identified three clusters: Cluster 1 (n = 3634; 38.8%) characterized by older patients and prevalent non-cardiac comorbidities; Cluster 2 (n = 2774; 29.6%) characterized by younger patients with low prevalence of comorbidities; Cluster 3 (n = 2955;31.6%) characterized by patients' prevalent cardiovascular risk factors/comorbidities. Over a mean follow-up of 22.5 months, Cluster 3 had the highest rate of cardiovascular events, all-cause death, and the composite outcome (combining the previous two) compared to Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 (all P < .001). An adjusted Cox regression showed that compared to Cluster 2, Cluster 3 (hazard ratio (HR) 2.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.27-3.62; HR 3.42, 95%CI 2.72-4.31; HR 2.79, 95%CI 2.32-3.35), and Cluster 1 (HR 1.88, 95%CI 1.48-2.38; HR 2.50, 95%CI 1.98-3.15; HR 2.09, 95%CI 1.74-2.51) reported a higher risk for the three outcomes respectively.ConclusionsIn European AF patients, three main clusters were identified, differentiated by differential presence of comorbidities. Both non-cardiac and cardiac comorbidities clusters were found to be associated with an increased risk of major adverse outcomes.© 2021. The Author(s).

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