Patterns of adipose tissue fatty acids and the risk of atrial fibrillation: A case-cohort study.

Pia Thisted Dinesen,Thomas Andersen Rix,Erik Berg Schmidt,Søren Lundbye-Christensen,Christina Cathrine Dahm,Kim Overvad,Albert Marni Joensen,Gregory Shearer

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208833

Pia Thisted Dinesen, Thomas Andersen Rix + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208833

Copy DOI

Abstract

Fatty acids in adipose tissue share dietary sources and metabolic pathways and therefore occur in patterns. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between adipose tissue fatty acid patterns identified by the data-driven dimension-reducing method treelet transform and the risk of atrial fibrillation. A total of 57,053 Danish men and women aged 50–64 years participating in the Diet, Cancer and Health cohort had an adipose tissue biopsy taken at baseline. During a median follow-up of 14.6 years, a total of 4,710 participants developed atrial fibrillation or atrial flutter. Adipose tissue biopsies were analysed for fatty acid content by gas chromatography for all cases of atrial fibrillation and for a randomly drawn subcohort (n = 3,500) representative for the entire cohort. Hazard ratios with 95% confidence intervals for atrial fibrillation according to quintiles of factor scores were determined by weighted Cox proportional hazards regression analyses for men and women separately. From the 32 fatty acids measured, 7 major factors/patterns of fatty acids were identified using treelet transform. We found that a pattern consisting of n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) (except linoleic acid) was associated with a lower hazard of atrial fibrillation. Patterns consisting of marine n-3 PUFA and containing n-9 fatty acids were associated with a lower hazard of atrial fibrillation in women. In conclusion, patterns of fatty acids in adipose tissue identified by treelet transform may be differentially associated with the risk of atrial fibrillation.

Highlights

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia with a prevalence of 1–2% in the general population [1], which is believed to rise substantially due to the aging population, in addition to an increase in established risk factors for AF such as diabetes mellitus [2]
Our study had several strengths: We studied the naturally occurring adipose tissue fatty acid patterns and the risk of incident AF in a large cohort with long and almost complete follow-up for vital status
We have previously found in this cohort that replacing dietary saturated fatty acids (SFA) with n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) was associated with a moderately higher risk of AF in men, while replacement with MUFA or other PUFA did not affect the risk [38]

Summary

Introduction

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia with a prevalence of 1–2% in the general population [1], which is believed to rise substantially due to the aging population, in addition to an increase in established risk factors for AF such as diabetes mellitus [2]. AF is associated with higher morbidity including a 5-fold higher risk of stroke and a 3-fold higher risk of congestive heart failure [1,3,4,5] and constitutes a serious public health problem. Previous studies have suggested that certain fatty acids may be associated with development of AF. Adipose tissue fatty acid patterns and AF authors used this method to access data and had no additional or special access privileges to data

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion