Hamilton, ON - Atrial tachyarrhythmias in the absence of clinical atrial fibrillation occur frequently among patients with pacemakers and are associated with a significant increase in the risk for stroke or systemic embolism over time[1].
Results of the Asymptomatic AF and Stroke Evaluation in Pacemaker Patients and the AF Reduction Atrial Pacing Trial (ASSERT) showed that, in this population of pacemaker patients with hypertension but no history of atrial fibrillation (AF), episodes of device-detected atrial tachycardia greater than six minutes were seen in approximately one-third of patients over almost three years of mean follow-up.
Further, these arrhythmias were associated with a 2.5-fold increase in the risk for ischemic stroke and systemic embolism. In a subgroup of patients with a CHADS2 score of 2 or higher, device-detected atrial tachyarrhythmias increased the absolute risk for stroke to 3.78% per year.
This study "shows clearly for the first time that silent atrial fibrillation in patients with pacemakers is in fact associated with quite a large increased risk of stroke," Dr Stuart J Connolly (McMaster University, Hamilton, ON) said in an interview.
"These silent, short episodes of atrial fibrillation that we're seeing seem to behave like the more typical clinical atrial fibrillation that we're all familiar with," he added. What remains to be determined is whether this risk could be reduced with anticoagulation.
Their findings are published in the January 12, 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, with first author Dr Jeff S Healey (McMaster University). They were first presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in November 2010 and reported by heartwire at that time.
Cryptogenic stroke
A large number of strokes have no apparent cause, and about 25% of stroke patients have no advanced vascular disease, Connolly said. "Increasingly in the past few years, people have suspected that these patients have atrial fibrillation, and some monitoring gets done to see if it can be diagnosed in these patients, but that has not really been very fruitful."
It's known that patients can have asymptomatic AF and that pacemakers often detect these asymptomatic cases incidentally because the devices have a lead in the left atrium, he said. The purpose of this study was to determine how prevalent silent AF is and whether it is actually causing strokes.
Patients were eligible for the study if they were 65 years of age or older, had a history of hypertension that required treatment, and had undergone first implantation of a pacemaker of sinus-node or atrioventricular-node disease or of an implantable cardioverter defibrillator for any indication in the preceding eight weeks. Exclusions included any history of AF or atrial flutter lasting more than five minutes or treatment with a vitamin-K antagonist for any reason.
A total of 2580 patients were enrolled and monitored for three months to detect subclinical atrial tachyarrhythmias, defined as episodes with an atrial rate of greater than 90 beats per minute for more than six minutes. They were then followed for a mean of 2.5 years for the primary outcome of ischemic stroke or systemic embolism. Patients with pacemakers were further randomly assigned to receive continuous atrial overdrive pacing or not.
At three months, subclinical atrial tachyarrhythmias had been detected in 261 participants, or 10.1%. These episodes were associated with significantly increased risk of clinical atrial fibrillation and of ischemic stroke or systemic embolism and remained predictive of stroke risk even after adjustment for stroke risk factors.
Risk for clinical AF and ischemic stroke with subclinical atrial tachyarrhythmias
| Outcome | Hazard r atio | 95% CI | p |
| Clinical AF | 5.56 | 3.78-8.17 | <0.001 |
| Ischemic stroke or systemic embolism | 2.49 | 1.28-4.85 | 0.007 |
| Ischemic stroke or systemic embo lism after adjustment for stroke predictors | 2.50 | 1.28-4.89 | 0.008 |
Of 51 patients who had a primary outcome event, 11 had subclinical atrial tachyarrhythmias detected by three months, but none had had clinical AF during that time frame.
The population-attributable risk of stroke or systemic embolism with subclinical atrial tachyarrhythmias was 13%, the authors write. "Continuous atrial overdrive pacing did not prevent atrial fibrillation," they conclude.
Their findings are important for several reasons, Connolly said. "One, there are a lot of patients with pacemakers out there, and we're detecting silent atrial fibrillation every day," he points out. There are approximately a million new devices implanted every year, and a prevalent pacemaker population of about five or six million people at any given time.
It hasn't been clear, however, what to do about this silent AF, because unlike clinical AF, the episodes are usually much shorter in duration and asymptomatic and only detectable by the device, he said. But these new results "don't mean that we should jump in and just start treating everybody," Connolly cautions. "Perhaps we should treat some patients, but probably we need to have more information and perhaps even a clinical trial."
The other question the findings raise is how common silent AF is in the population of patients without pacemakers and whether it may account for some proportion at least of cryptogenic strokes. "Pacemaker patients are not that different; they tend to share characteristics with a huge population of patients with vascular risk factors," he notes. "They're elderly, hypertensive, diabetic, and the pacemaker is only incidental to their other disease." Studies using implantable-loop recorders in patients with risk factors for stroke but no clinical AF may help to answer that question.
One strategy already being undertaken is using implantable-loop recorders in patients with a history of cryptogenic stroke to look for subclinical atrial tachyarrhythmias, he added. One such study, sponsored by Medtronic and called the Study of Continuous Cardiac Monitoring to Assess Atrial Fibrillation After Cryptogenic Stroke (CRYSTAL-AF), began enrollment in 2009.
"So those are all important avenues that need to be explored and will get explored," Connolly said. "I personally think that silent atrial fibrillation is probably fairly common in elderly patients with risk factors for stroke and is probably responsible for some substantial burden of stroke. Exactly how much, that remains to be seen."
A clinical judgment
In an editorial accompanying the paper[2], Dr Gervasio Lamas (Columbia University Division of Cardiology at Mount Sinai, Miami Beach, FL) calls a possible association between silent AF and risk of stroke and systemic embolism an "intriguing" question and writes that this "robust, prospective, observational study leads the clinician to accept the association as true. Questions remain, however, about cause and effect, as well as about clinical significance."
While it "strains logic" that a six-minute episode of AF would cause a cardioembolic stroke, patients with brief episodes of AF are likely to have longer ones that lead to cardioembolic events, he writes. To support causation, the AF should precede the stroke and there should also be a "time-threshold effect, whereby a greater burden of atrial fibrillation or longer episodes of atrial fibrillation should confer a greater risk of stroke."
Alternatively, these short episodes may simply be a marker of stroke risk, perhaps signaling structural heart disease such as myocardial fibrosis or mitral-valve disease, rather than causing thrombus in the left atrial appendage, he speculates. A proinflammatory state like diabetes or metabolic syndrome could also be associated with brief AF episodes and with stroke; in this study, patients with CHADS2 scores of 2 or higher had a stroke event rate of almost 4% per year, he points out.
"The real question, of course, is to define a take-home message for the nonelectrophysiologist, like myself, who has a patient with an implanted pacemaker or defibrillator," Lamas writes. "But now we reach the limits of the present data."
Until clinical trials targeting this population with short, asymptomatic episodes of high atrial rate are done, there is no evidence for treatment with warfarin or other anticoagulants, he writes.
"For now, therefore, I will continue to turn to the now-venerable CHADS2 score, consider applying it to patients with asymptomatic episodes of atrial fibrillation lasting for hours, and make a clinical judgment about the need for anticoagulation," he concludes. "I will also wait for definitive studies to be performed in this interesting, at-risk population."
| The study was supported by St Jude Medical. Healey reports receiving consulting fees from St. Jude Medical, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Bayer and grant support from Boehringer Ingelheim, Boston Scientific, and Astra Zeneca. Connolly has received grant support and lecture fees from St Jude Medical . Disclosures for the coauthors are listed in the paper. Lamas has received t ravel , accommodation, or meeting expenses from St Jude Medical. |
Heartwire from Medscape © 2012
Cite this: Silent atrial fibrillation increases stroke risk - Medscape - Jan 12, 2012.
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