Somers - Figure 42
12-Month Recurrence of Afib
FIG. 42: Following up on the data presented in the previous few Figures, the question is, if these patients coming to be cardioverted for AF also have a high likelihood of sleep apnea, then what is the effect of sleep apnea on the success of the cardioversion? This Figure presents 3 groups of patients.
The first group comprises patients who were cardioverted without knowing whether they had sleep apnea.[32] We did not ask them and they did not tell us. Of these, about 50% returned with a recurrence of AF within one year after cardioversion. The yellow bar shows patients with treated sleep apnea; of those, only 40% returned with recurrence of AF within a year . The third group comprised patients in whom we knew sleep apnea existed, but they either did not want or did not tolerate CPAP therapy; of those patients, 80% came back within a year after cardioversion with a recurrence of AF.
An important caveat is that these are observational data, and we do not yet have randomized, controlled clinical trial data conclusively demonstrating that treating OSA will decrease the recurrence of AF after cardioversion.
References
Kanagala R, Murali NS, Friedman PA, et al. Obstructive sleep apnea and the recurrence of atrial fibrillation. Circulation 2003;107:2589–2994.
