AFIB not just in Older People

Recently a star football player in the NFL went into AFIB - 31 years old, After cardioversion, he went back to play. I get irritated when I see literature that states most AFIB is in the older population, since we know younger people are developing this. My Cardiologist told me he is seeing patient's in 30's with AFIB. There are various theories around this, which I won't go into. I had my first episode at 30, over 40 years ago. Not a lot of options then for treatment. I am grateful for advances. What I have learned over these years is that once you get the first episode, it will be a life long issue at some level. I feel for the young folks.

Yes, afib can occur at almost any age, but it's true that it predominantly occurs after 50 and becomes increasingly common with advancing age, so the literature isn't wrong by saying most afib is in the older population. A lot of the younger onset afib is among athletes, particularly endurance athletes and professionals. In other words, people who spend years subjecting their hearts to hours of heavy workloads. The people who develop afib in their 20s or 30s for no particular reason probably either chose the wrong parents or have other cardiac issues like valve disease.

Caption: Distribution of Patient Ages in Atrial Fibrillation Cohort Five-year age categories are displayed on the x-axis, while the y-axis reports the proportion of patients in each age category in our atrial fibrillation cohort. The mean age is 70.5.

Participants: Adults (aged 28-93) with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF) seen between March 2013 and February 2014 (N = 1,585).


source

So, if you understand normal distributions, or their close approximations, the observer can clearly see 'skewness' toward the right and the older populations found under the curve formed by the very tops of those bars. I'm not going to bother finding out what the standard deviation is, but my guess is that something near 4-6% of all cases of AF are under the age of about 40. It isn't insignificant, but it is hardly 'representative'.

BTW, sleep apnea has exactly the same distribution. I wonder why....

I am leaning toward blaming my parents. My mother did not exactly have a healthy lifestyle when she was pregnant. Who knows? I had one Doc tell me that if I keep trying to find out the cause of my AFIB when I was 30, it will drive me crazy.

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sldabrowski
Recently a star football player in the NFL went into AFIB - 31 years old, After cardioversion, he went back to play. I get irritated when I see literature that states most AFIB is in the older population, since we know younger people are developing this. My Cardiologist told me he is seeing patients in 30's with AFIB. There are various theories around this, which I won't go into.

In 18 years of participating here, most folks, but certainly not all, who show up under 50 (or even 60) are people who are athletic with a genetic predisposition for afib. People in their teens or twenties are rare, but not unheard of. Likely even an even stronger genetic predisposition. In 2005, we did an informal survey asking people here if they considered themself athletic and/or tall. All but two of the men were athletic and tall. The women were more varied, but the majority were athletic. [www.afibbers.org]

My 36 year old son-in-law started having afib at around 30. I made suggestions to him on exercise (which he follows) and also tracking episodes. One trigger for him was alcohol another stress. More recently he started wearing a continuous glucose monitor and found that glucose spikes (he's not diabetic) were also a trigger. Shannon and I coached him to ask for a script for on-demand flecainide, which he got.. This has worked very well for him as have implementing the exercise suggestions, moderating alcohol, reducing stress and now paying attention to foods. He may need an ablation at some point, but he's in the military and would have no say in the choice of an ablating EP at this time, so the objective is to keep the afib under control with lifestyle and PIP flec till he retires when he would have a choice.