This Week in Cardiolgy

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I saw these two comments in this week in cardiology on Medscape written by Dr. John Mandrola, an America electrophysiologist.

1. The thing is, death is a common occurrence after a new diagnosis of atrial fibrillation (AF). Multiple observational studies report a 20% to 25% mortality in the first year after AF diagnosis.

I have never seen anything like this statement before.

2. I’ve been ablating AF for 20 years, and we still have not a clue what causes this condition. We have no clue about the best strategies to ablate AF, we have no proper sham-controlled trials of AF ablation.

What we have now are $9000 ablation catheters rather than $3000 ablation catheters. That is hardly progress.