Find AF—Efforts to find patients with atrial fibrillation—

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Recently, the number of the patients having atrial fibrillation (AF) is increasing with aging of the population. We screened patients who come to the outpatient department of our hospital and tried to detect proactively patients with asymptomatic AF, which is the main cause of cardiogenic embolism (CE) in brain.Methods: We build the system for early detection of asymptomatic AF. We called it “Find AF” project and publicized it to all the staffs in our hospital. To screen irregular pulse of outpatients before medical examination of the doctor, an automated sphygmomanometer with irregular heart beat (IHB) detection function (hereafter, IHB detection sphygmomanometer) was used. The investigation period spanned for 2 years, from December 2011 to November 2013. We performed electrocardiography on patients who had been detected as having irregular pulse.Results: During these 2 years, the number of AF patients for whom anticoagulation treatment was considered/introduced was 56, including those who were newly diagnosed as AF and those who were having AF untreated. This figure amounts to 0.2% of all outpatients. AF was tended to overlook among patients who were visiting our hospital regularly. Irregular pulse of chronic AF was not detected in 25.7% of patients even with an IHB detection sphygmomanometer.Conclusion: Through this effort, we could detect asymptomatic AF among outpatients and could start anticoagulation treatment to prevent CE. However, there are still possibilities of overlooking AF patients by simply using IHB detection sphygmomanometer. It will be necessary to develop an AF detection device with a higher precision.