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Published in: BMC Medicine 1/2021

01-12-2021 | Oral Anticoagulant | Research article

Impact of clinical phenotypes on management and outcomes in European atrial fibrillation patients: a report from the ESC-EHRA EURObservational Research Programme in AF (EORP-AF) General Long-Term Registry

Authors: Marco Proietti, Marco Vitolo, Stephanie L. Harrison, Deirdre A. Lane, Laurent Fauchier, Francisco Marin, Michael Nabauer, Tatjana S. Potpara, Gheorghe-Andrei Dan, Giuseppe Boriani, Gregory Y. H. Lip, on behalf of the ESC-EHRA EORP-AF Long-Term General Registry Investigators

Published in: BMC Medicine | Issue 1/2021

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Abstract

Background

Epidemiological studies in atrial fibrillation (AF) illustrate that clinical complexity increase the risk of major adverse outcomes. We aimed to describe European AF patients’ clinical phenotypes and analyse the differential clinical course.

Methods

We performed a hierarchical cluster analysis based on Ward’s Method and Squared Euclidean Distance using 22 clinical binary variables, identifying the optimal number of clusters. We investigated differences in clinical management, use of healthcare resources and outcomes in a cohort of European AF patients from a Europe-wide observational registry.

Results

A total of 9363 were available for this analysis. We identified three clusters: Cluster 1 (n = 3634; 38.8%) characterized by older patients and prevalent non-cardiac comorbidities; Cluster 2 (n = 2774; 29.6%) characterized by younger patients with low prevalence of comorbidities; Cluster 3 (n = 2955;31.6%) characterized by patients’ prevalent cardiovascular risk factors/comorbidities. Over a mean follow-up of 22.5 months, Cluster 3 had the highest rate of cardiovascular events, all-cause death, and the composite outcome (combining the previous two) compared to Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 (all P < .001). An adjusted Cox regression showed that compared to Cluster 2, Cluster 3 (hazard ratio (HR) 2.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.27–3.62; HR 3.42, 95%CI 2.72–4.31; HR 2.79, 95%CI 2.32–3.35), and Cluster 1 (HR 1.88, 95%CI 1.48–2.38; HR 2.50, 95%CI 1.98–3.15; HR 2.09, 95%CI 1.74–2.51) reported a higher risk for the three outcomes respectively.

Conclusions

In European AF patients, three main clusters were identified, differentiated by differential presence of comorbidities. Both non-cardiac and cardiac comorbidities clusters were found to be associated with an increased risk of major adverse outcomes.
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Metadata
Title
Impact of clinical phenotypes on management and outcomes in European atrial fibrillation patients: a report from the ESC-EHRA EURObservational Research Programme in AF (EORP-AF) General Long-Term Registry
Authors
Marco Proietti
Marco Vitolo
Stephanie L. Harrison
Deirdre A. Lane
Laurent Fauchier
Francisco Marin
Michael Nabauer
Tatjana S. Potpara
Gheorghe-Andrei Dan
Giuseppe Boriani
Gregory Y. H. Lip
on behalf of the ESC-EHRA EORP-AF Long-Term General Registry Investigators
Publication date
01-12-2021
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
BMC Medicine / Issue 1/2021
Electronic ISSN: 1741-7015
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-021-02120-3

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