Covid-19 and A-fib

I found this November 17 2021 news release on my cruise through the internet tonight:

"Atrial fibrillation significantly increases a person’s risk of serious complications and death from COVID-19"

"Findings from the study by Dr. Cutler and his colleagues were presented this week at the American Heart Association’s 2021 Scientific Sessions. For the study, researchers examined 3,119 Intermountain Healthcare patients who tested positive for COVID between March 2020 and May 2021, and who also had a prior atrial fibrillation diagnosis. The Intermountain researchers found that these patients did clinically worse than patients without a previous atrial fibrillation diagnosis."

"Based on these results, Dr. Cutler said that patients with atrial fibrillation should know that they are in a higher risk category, and must take appropriate precautions against the virus, like getting vaccinated, wearing a mask and social distancing, when appropriate.

Knowing patients with atrial fibrillation are at high risk for complications and death should also influence how clinicians treat atrial fibrillation patients with COVID-19 illness."

Thanks for this. The question of whether afib constitutes a risk factor has been asked multiple times here but we just haven't had a good answer. This is something we can offer from a reliable source.

It seems this study doesn't take into account some other factors like : age of the patients; other health issues aside of their afib; paroxysmal, persistent or permanent afib...

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Pompon
It seems this study doesn't take into account some other factors like : age of the patients; other health issues aside of their afib; paroxysmal, persistent or permanent afib...

I concur. Commonly afib is associated with many comorbidities. The chronically fit who get afib appear to be overrepresented in posters here. I would posit that this group has many fewer comorbidities.

I could only find news reports about the study, not the study itself. I was curious to know how much detail they had about the people they studied other than they "had a prior atrial fibrillation diagnosis". You'd think there would be differences between people diagnosed with lone AF, paroxysmal, persistent, and permanent, and there are other variables, etc. You'd also want to look at groups of patients in narrower time frames. Treatments changed dramatically over the duration of the study, i.e. between March 2020 and May 2021. Monoclonal antibodies started trickling out for use October 2020. Vaccines became available as of December 2020.

If you consider patient outcomes during the entire study period you aren't going to be looking at what the risk of Covid for those diagnosed with A-fib is now.

The outlook now, for a person diagnosed with A-fib, who is vaccinated three times who still takes reasonable precautions with social distancing and masking, given that we are vaccinated, we can now be treated with monoclonals and perhaps the new oral pills, can't be anything like what the study concluded.

I'm going to think of myself as subject to somewhat more of a Covid risk than the average cautious prudent bear out there, but I don't see the extra risk as very large.