Risk Assessment of Stroke in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation: Current Shortcomings and Future Directions.

Hyman DA, Siebert V, Jia X, Alam M, Levine GN, Virani SS, Birnbaum Y. Risk Assessment of Stroke in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation: Current Shortcomings and Future Directions. Cardiovascular drugs and therapy. 2019 Feb 1; 33(1):105-117.

Related HSR&D Project(s)

• IIR 16-072 – Determining and targeting reasons for low statin use to improve guideline-concordant statin therapy in high-risk patients

Dimensions for VA is a web-based tool available to VA staff that enables detailed searches of published research and research projects.

If you have VA-Intranet access, click here for more information vaww.hsrd.research.va.gov/dimensions/

VA staff not currently on the VA network can access Dimensions by registering for an account using their VA email address.    Search Dimensions for VA for this citation
* Don't have VA-internal network access or a VA email address? Try searching the free-to-the-public version of Dimensions

Search for Abstract from PubMed

---

Abstract:

Atrial fibrillation is a well-known risk factor for cardioembolic stroke; a number of risk stratification scoring systems have been developed to help differentiate which patients would stand to benefit from anticoagulation. However, these scoring systems cannot be utilized in patients whose atrial fibrillation has not been diagnosed. As implantable cardiac monitors become more prevalent, it becomes possible to identify occult, subclinical atrial fibrillation. With this data, it is also possible to examine the relationship between episodes of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and thromboembolism and the total burden of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and thromboembolic risk. The data gleaned from these devices provides insight and raises questions regarding the underlying mechanism of thromboembolism in atrial fibrillation, and in doing so, exposes shortcomings in the present clinical use of current risk scoring systems, specifically, the inability to account for atrial fibrillation burden and to apply scores at all in subclinical atrial fibrillation.