-
J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. · Sep 2013
Clinical TrialThromboembolic complications after cardioversion of acute atrial fibrillation: the FinCV (Finnish CardioVersion) study.
- K E Juhani Airaksinen, Toni Grönberg, Ilpo Nuotio, Marko Nikkinen, Antti Ylitalo, Fausto Biancari, and Juha E K Hartikainen.
- Heart Center, Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland. Electronic address: juhani.airaksinen@tyks.fi.
- J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 2013 Sep 24;62(13):1187-92.
ObjectivesThis study sought to explore the incidence and risk factors of thromboembolic complications after cardioversion of acute atrial fibrillation.BackgroundAnticoagulation therapy is currently recommended after cardioversion of acute atrial fibrillation in patients with risk factors for stroke, but the implementation of these new consensus-based guidelines has been slow.MethodsA total of 7,660 cardioversions were performed in 3,143 consecutive patients with atrial fibrillation lasting <48 h in 3 hospitals. For this analysis, embolic complications were evaluated during the 30 days after 5,116 successful cardioversions in 2,481 patients with neither oral anticoagulation nor peri-procedural heparin therapy.ResultsThere were 38 (0.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.5% to 1.0%) definite thromboembolic events (31 strokes) within 30 days (median 2 days, mean 4.6 days) after cardioversion. In addition, 4 patients suffered transient ischemic attack after cardioversion. Age (odds ratio [OR]: 1.05; 95% CI: 1.02 to 1.08), female sex (OR: 2.1; 95% CI: 1.1 to 4.0), heart failure (OR: 2.9; 95% CI: 1.1 to 7.2), and diabetes (OR: 2.3; 95% CI: 1.1 to 4.9) were the independent predictors of definite embolic events. Classification tree analysis showed that the highest risk of thromboembolism (9.8%) was observed among patients with heart failure and diabetes, whereas patients with no heart failure and age <60 years had the lowest risk of thromboembolism (0.2%).ConclusionsThe incidence of post-cardioversion thromboembolic complications is high in certain subgroups of patients when no anticoagulation is used after cardioversion of acute atrial fibrillation. (Safety of Cardioversion of Acute Atrial Fibrillation [FinCV]; NCT01380574).Copyright © 2013 American College of Cardiology Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*
,_underline_
or**bold**
. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>
and subscript<sub>text</sub>
. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3.
, hyphens-
or asterisks*
. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
- Images can be included with:
![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
- For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)
inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]
to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote.
.