Abstract
Atrial fibrillation is a common cardiac arrhythmia that has many risk factors including some medications; however, the effect of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and its risk is not well assessed. This study was conducted to find out if there is an association between the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and risk of atrial fibrillation. The study was conducted at Al-Hussein Medical City Hospital in Karbala-Iraq as a retrospective case-control study between September 2014 and March 2015; including 90 patients with atrial fibrillation and 90 control subjects who were age and sex matched, and based on risk-set sampling. Current use of NSAID was started within one month and chronic use for more than one month was recorded. The current use of NSAIDs by patients with atrial fibrillation was found in 43 patients out of 90 (47.7%) of which new users were 29 (32.2%) and chronic users were 14 (15.5%), while it was found in 27 out of 90 (30%) of the control subjects who were current users of NSAIDs. That difference was statistically significant (p-value was 0.015), the odds ratio (OR) was 2.135 and 95% confidence intervals (CI) was 1.16-3.94. This study suggests that the current use of NSAIDs might be associated with increased risk of incidence of atrial fibrillation. Key words: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, atrial fibrillation.
Highlights
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac rhythm disorder observed in clinical practice that usually requires hospital admission
The aim of this study was to find out if there is an association between the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and the risk of incidence of the most common cardiac arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation
There was obviously no significant difference between AF patients and control subjects regarding age, sex and body mass index (BMI), so they are considered as matched groups
Summary
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac rhythm disorder observed in clinical practice that usually requires hospital admission. It is defined as a tachyarrhythmia characterized by predominantly uncoordinated atrial activation with consequent deterioration of atrial function (National Collaborating Centre for Chronic Conditions (UK), 2006). The prevalence of AF doubles during each advancing decade of life, from 0.5% at the age of 50s to above 10% at the age of 80s (Heeringa et al, 2006) It is usually associated with increasing mortality and morbidity, mainly due to hemodynamic impairments that aggravate or even cause heart failure (Stevenson et al, 2004), and the increased risk of thromboembolic stroke resulting
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