Frailty, AF do not appear to be associated
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Researchers found no evidence demonstrating an association between frailty and atrial fibrillation in participants from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort.
“From other work, we know that there are several factors that increase the risk of developing AF, including age, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, smoking, etc. Some of these are also risk factors for frailty, which is why we were surprised by our results,” Ariela R. Orkaby, MD, MPH, associate epidemiologist in the division of aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told Healio. “We expected to find that AF and frailty would be associated with one another, at least in one direction. In this study of 2,053 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, we did not find a statistically meaningful relationship between atrial fibrillation and frailty in either direction.”
Researchers used data from 2,053 participants (mean age, 70 years; 56% women) from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort and examined the association between frailty and incident AF through 2016 and the association between prevalent AF and frailty status from 2011 to 2014. Frailty was defined using the Fried phenotype of frail, prefrail or robust.
In total, 1,018 participants were defined as robust, 903 participants were defined as prefrail and 132 were defined as frail. Researchers observed 306 incident AF cases that occurred during an average of 9.2 years of follow-up. There were no statistically significant associations between prevalent frailty status and incident AF after adjusting for age, sex and smoking for prefrail vs. robust (HR = 1.22; 95% CI, 0.95-1.55) or frail vs. robust (HR = 0.92; 95% CI, 0.57-1.47).
During follow-up, researchers observed 111 new cases of frailty among participants. There was no statistically significant association between prevalent AF and new-onset frailty at follow-up after adjusting for confounders (OR = 0.48; 95% CI, 0.17-1.36).
According to the researchers, several limitations of this study include being unable to exclude residual confounding or establish causal relations, bias in results due to participants with missing frailty scores having higher adverse risk factor profiles and occurrence of AF and death and the possibility of failing to detect smaller associations between AF and frailty. The results may also not be applicable to other races and ethnicities not represented in the Framingham Heart Study, the researchers wrote.
“Our study sample was relatively small and should be repeated in a larger cohort,” Orkaby said in an interview. “It is possible that with a larger sample a relationship between AF and frailty will be found.”
For more information:
Ariela R. Orkaby, MD, MPH, can be reached at aorkaby@bwh.harvard.edu.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts