A Prospective Randomized Multicenter Comparison on Health‐Related Quality of Life: The Value of Add‐On Arrhythmia Surgery in Patients with Paroxysmal, Permanent or Persistent Atrial Fibrillation Undergoing Valvular and/or Coronary Bypass Surgery

Abstract

Health-related quality of life in patients with paroxysmal, permanent and persistent atrial fibrillation improves after cardiac surgery regardless of giving add-on surgery or not, but this improvement is presumably more affected by treating the underlying heart disease than by restoring sinus rhythm.

Prospective Assessment of Short‐ and Long‐Term Quality of Life After Ablation for Atrial Fibrillation

“…In this latter study, only 2 questionnaires were used and there was no comparison between patients with paroxysmal and persistent AF. In an additional study by Van Breugel et al , 32 patients who underwent cardiac surgery were randomly assigned to additional arrhythmia surgery. Both groups showed stable sinus rhythm in 62% regardless of arrhythmia surgery after 12 months and both groups showed a significant improvement in the SF 36, the multidimensional Fatigue Inventory 20 and the Euro QoL (EQ‐5D + VAS) regardless of the arrhythmia surgery.…”

Expert consensus guidelines: Examining surgical ablation for atrial fibrillation

“…A total of 905 studies were identified from the original PubMed search, of which 300 were reviewed in depth for inclusion, and 38 studies ultimately met all inclusion criteria. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]40,42,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57] The remaining 262 studies were excluded because of no comparison group (n ¼ 245), case report (n ¼ 7), no outcome (n ¼ 6), or duplicate data from the same investigators (n ¼ 4).…”

Does sinus rhythm conversion after cardiac surgery affect postoperative health- related quality of life?

“…Pre- and postoperative clinical data were used from the patients enrolled in the ASAF trial [7]. Based on their rhythm outcome patients were divided in two groups: SR at 12 months follow up (SR 12 ) or AF at 12 months follow up (non-SR 12 ).…”

“…Based on their rhythm outcome patients were divided in two groups: SR at 12 months follow up (SR 12 ) or AF at 12 months follow up (non-SR 12 ). Antiarrhythmic and anticoagulant protocols were as previously reported [7]. Patients were seen at the outpatient clinic 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months after the surgical procedure, and annually thereafter.…”

“…The following variables were entered as potential predictors into the model: preoperative (age, gender, type of AF, AF duration, left atrial dimension, left ventricular ejection fraction, myocardial infarction,hypertension, diabetes, renal disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, renal insufficiency) intraoperative (coronary artery bypass grafting, valve replacement, associated intervention,other cardiac surgery) and postoperative (SR D , SR 3 , SR 6 , SR 12 ). On the basis of our previous experience [7] we created four new categorical variables (0/1) in the dataset: female sex, age ≥ 65 years, AF duration ≥12 months and type of AF > paroxysmal. We choosed a γ distribution with a log-link function on the basis of the best goodness-of-fit and the type III analysis.…”