How many people have A-Fib? Three times more than we thought

In the first national estimate in two decades, UCSF reports that 10.5 million Americans have atrial fibrillation, a dangerous but highly treatable arrhythmia.

2024-09-11

(Press-News.org) Atrial fibrillation, a rapid, irregular heart beat that can lead to stroke or sudden death, is three times more common than previously thought, affecting nearly 5% of the population, or 10.5 million U.S. adults, according to new estimates from UC San Francisco.

A-Fib, as the condition is commonly known, has been on the rise for at least the past decade, driven by the aging of the population, along with increasing rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Earlier projections had estimated that 3.3 million U.S. adults had atrial fibrillation, but these have not been updated in more than two decades.

The study appears Sept. 11 in JACC.

“Atrial fibrillation doubles the risk of mortality, is one of the most common causes of stroke, increases risks of heart failure, myocardial infarction, chronic kidney disease and dementia, and results in lower quality of life,” said first author Jean Jacques Noubiap, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF with a specialty in global cardiovascular health.

“Fortunately, atrial fibrillation is preventable, and early detection and appropriate treatment can substantially reduce its adverse outcomes,” he said.

Rising numbers reflect need for better prevention and treatment

UCSF investigators reviewed the medical records of nearly 30 million adult patients who received some form of acute or procedural care in California from 2005 to 2019. About 2 million of these people had been diagnosed with A-Fib, and the numbers grew over time, rising from 4.49% of the patients treated between 2005 and 2009 to 6.82% of the patients treated between 2015 and 2019.

The data were standardized to reflect the entire country, and researchers estimated the current national prevalence to be at least 10.55 million. They also found that during the study timeframe, A-Fib patients skewed younger, were less likely to be female and more likely to have hypertension and diabetes.

A-Fib has a broad spectrum of complications from shortness of breath and light-headedness to blood clots, stroke and even heart failure. Studies have shown that people with A-Fib are up to 5 times more likely to have a stroke. The authors said that by outlining the scope of the problem, these new estimates can help guide health care planning, resource allocation and public health interventions.

“Physicians recognize that atrial fibrillation is often encountered in essentially every field of practice,” said senior and corresponding author Gregory M. Marcus, MD, MAS, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at UCSF Health. “These data provide objective evidence to demonstrate that prior projections severely underestimated how common it truly is.”

Digital technologies may reveal it is even more common than the current analysis indicates.

“With the growing use of consumer wearables designed to detect atrial fibrillation combined with safer and more effective means to treat it, this current prevalence of atrial fibrillation in health care settings may soon be dwarfed by future healthcare utilization that will occur due to the disease,” Marcus said.

Authors: The other authors are Janet J. Tang, PhD, MPH; Justin T. Teraoka; and Thomas A. Dewland, MD, all of UCSF’s Division of Cardiology.

Funding: The study was supported by the NIH/NHLBI (R01HL158825-01).

Disclosures: Marcus is a consultant for and equity holder in InCarda.

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF's primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at ucsf.edu, or see our Fact Sheet.

###

Follow UCSF
ucsf.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsf

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Groundbreaking achievement: NSF Daniel K. Inouye solar telescope produces its first magnetic field maps of the sun’s corona

2024-09-11

Summary: The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by successfully producing its first detailed maps of the Sun’s coronal magnetic fields. This milestone, led by NSO Associate Astronomer Dr. Tom Schad, was recently published in Science Advances, and promises to enhance our understanding of the Sun's atmosphere and how its changing conditions lead to impacts on Earth's technology-dependent society. The corona, or the Sun’s ...

Landmark study reveals how antibiotics contribute to inflammatory bowel disease risk

2024-09-11

In a landmark study published today in Science Advances, Dr. Shai Bel and his research team at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University have uncovered crucial insights into how antibiotic use increases the risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study demonstrates that antibiotics interfere with the protective mucus layer in the intestine, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of antibiotic effects and IBD development. IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects approximately 1% of the global population. This debilitating condition is ...

Neuromorphic platform presents huge leap forward in computing efficiency 

2024-09-11

In a landmark advancement, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a brain-inspired analog computing platform capable of storing and processing data in an astonishing 16,500 conductance states within a molecular film. Published today in the journal Nature, this breakthrough represents a huge step forward over traditional digital computers in which data storage and processing are limited to just two states.  Such a platform could potentially bring complex AI tasks, like training Large Language Models (LLMs), to ...

Genetics of dementia in African and underrepresented populations presented

2024-09-11

Regions of the genome associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in African populations will be presented at the Future of Dementia in Africa conference on September 11-12, 2024. The studies highlight discrepancies compared to Caucasian populations and underscore that a lack of diversity in genomic studies potentially limits the effectiveness of targeted therapies across diverse populations. The Future of Dementia in Africa conference will take place at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a Nature Conference, ...

Turning seawater into fresh water through solar power

2024-09-11

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an energy-efficient device that produces drinking water from seawater using an evaporation process driven largely by the sun. Desalination is critical for many coastal and island nations to provide access to fresh water, given water scarcity concerns due to rapid population growth and increasing global water consumption. Roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, emphasizing the urgent need for new technologies to generate fresh water, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2024. Current desalination systems pump seawater through membranes to ...

How the oceans’ most abundant bacteria impact global nutrient flows

2024-09-11

If you were to collect all the organisms from the ocean surface down to 200 meters, you’d find that SAR11 bacteria, though invisible to the naked eye, would make up a fifth of the total biomass. These bacteria, also known as Pelagibacterales, have evolved to thrive in nutrient-poor marine environments and play a significant role in global nutrient cycles. Despite their importance, the mechanisms behind their impact on the planetary ecosystem have remained unclear. But now, a recent Nature paper by researchers from the Okinawa ...

Discovery of a new phase of matter in 2D which defies normal statistical mechanics

2024-09-11

Physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge have created the first two-dimensional version of the Bose glass, a novel phase of matter that challenges statistical mechanics. The details of the study have been published in Nature. As the name suggests, the Bose glass has some glassy properties and within it all particles are localised. This means that each particle in the system sticks to itself, not mixing with its neighbours. If coffee was localised, then when stirring milk into the coffee, the intricate pattern of black and white stripes would remain forever, instead of washing out to an average. To create this new phase of matter, the group overlapped several laser ...

Genes with strong impact on menopause timing also link to cancer risk

2024-09-11

New research has found four genes with some of the largest known effects on the timing of menopause discovered to date, providing new insight into links between menopause timing and cancer risk. Genes come in pairs, and when women only have one working copy of the four new genes identified (ETAA1, ZNF518A, PNPLA8, PALB2), they have menopause between two and five-and-a-half years earlier than average. Published in Nature, the large-scale analysis was funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome. The team first looked at variation in data from genetic sequencing of 106,973 post-menopausal ...

Ancient DNA from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) refutes best-selling population collapse theory

2024-09-11

Rapa Nui or Te Pito o Te Henua (the navel of the world), also known as Easter Island, is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. Located in the Pacific, it lies over 1,900 km east of the closest inhabited Polynesian island and 3,700 km west of South America. Although the island, its inhabitants and their rich culture have been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists, two key elements of Rapanui history remain very controversial to this day. One of these is the theory of population collapse through "ecocide" or "ecological ...

Researchers combine the power of AI and the connectome to predict brain cell activity

2024-09-11

With maps of the connections between neurons and artificial intelligence methods, researchers can now do what they never thought possible: predict the activity of individual neurons without making a single measurement in a living brain. For decades, neuroscientists have spent countless hours in the lab painstakingly measuring the activity of neurons in living animals to tease out how the brain enables behavior. These experiments have yielded groundbreaking insights into how the brain works, but they have only scratched the surface, leaving much of the brain unexplored. Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence and the connectome – a ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Maynooth University study reveals impact of homework on student achievement in maths and science

Reducing floodplain development doesn’t need to be complex

Lights, camera, action! Coronavirus spike proteins can be selectively detected in 5 minutes

Your Zoom background could influence how tired you feel after a video call

With the use of visual cues, hospital rooms get nearly 70% cleaner

Serial-autoencoder for personalized recommendation

How do look for microbes in nature that are beneficial to plant?

Exotic species invasions enhance biodiversity response to climate change

Arctic warming may fuel ice formation in clouds

Rugged Falklands landscape was once a lush rainforest

Dizziness in older adults is linked to higher risk of future falls

Triptans more effective than newer, more expensive migraine drugs

Iron given through the vein corrects iron deficiency anaemia in pregnant women faster and better than iron taken by mouth

The Lancet Neurology: Air pollution, high temperatures, and metabolic risk factors driving global increases in stroke, with latest figures estimating 12 million cases and over 7 million deaths from st