Editorial Prognosis in atrial fibrillation

This editorial refers to ‘Incidence and mortality risk of congestive heart failure in atrial fibrillation patients: a community-based study over two decades’ † by Y. Miyasaka et al., on page 936 The public health importance of a disease is related to the number of people affected and to the mortality and mor-bidity that it causes. This metric underscores the clinical importance of atrial fibrillation (AF). AF is the most common of the supraventricular arrhythmias. Recent data suggest that there are 2.3 million individuals with AF in the USA alone.1 Also, there is a strong association of AF with advancing age. About 1 % of individuals between 60 and 69 years of age have AF but this rises to 5 % for individ-uals older than 69 years and to 9 % for individuals in their ninth decade.2,3 With the known, dramatic aging of th