Patients who develop atrial fibrillation (AFib) after surgery face a higher risk of being hospitalized for heart failure, according to new data published in the European Heart Journal.[1]

The study’s authors tracked data from more than 76,000 patients who underwent heart surgery and more than 2.9 million patients who underwent a surgery unrelated to their heart. All patients were treated in one of 11 U.S. states from 2016 to 2018. The median follow-up period was 1.7 years.

A total of 18.8% of heart surgery patients developed AFib, seeing their risk of a heart failure hospitalization increase by a third. Also, 0.8% of the patients undergoing surgery unrelated to their heart developed AFib; their risk of a heart failure hospitalization doubled.

“Our study, which to our knowledge is the largest study to date, shows that post-operative AFib is associated with future heart failure hospitalizations,” first author Parag Goyal, MD, MSc, an associate professor of medicine in the Weill Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said in a statement. “This could mean that AFib is an important indicator of underlying but not yet detected heart failure; or it could mean that atrial fibrillation itself contributes to the future development of heart failure. While this study could not specifically address which of these mechanisms are at play, our hope is that this study will inspire future work into exploring the underlying mechanism seen in our important findings. Regardless of the mechanism, our study shows that post-operative AFib is clearly an important entity that merits attention and incorporation into decision making.”