A Better Predictor of Atrial Fibrillation?
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Sleep-related hypoxemia is a better indicator of atrial fibrillation (AF) risk than the commonly-used apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), new research suggests. There have been multiple studies showing that higher AHI, indicating more severe sleep apnea, is associated with atrial fibrillation. But pathologically, it makes a lot more sense that it would be the hypoxia or the gas exchange issues that are a result of sleep apnea that would be affecting the cardiovascular system
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@arpan Leveraging data from sleep studies conducted at the Cleveland Clinic, the researchers tested the hypothesis that sleep-disordered breathing and, in particular, sleep-related hypoxemia are associated with the development of AF after accounting for confounding factors. Among 42,057 patients without AF at baseline,1947 (4.6%) developed AF over the next 5 years. In a multivariate model, for each 10-unit increase in percent sleep time with oxygen saturation less than 90% (T90), incident AF increased by 6% (hazard ratio [HR], 1.06; 95% CI, 1.04-1.08). Patients with the highest T90 (11.6%) had 28% greater risk for incident AF compared with reference patients with T90 of less than 0.1% (HR, 1.28; 95% CI, 1.11-1.47).