14 DAY TRIAL // Atrial fibrillation is one of the most common forms of heart disease in the world, and its main effect is that it causes disorders in the natural rhythm of the organ, thus exhausting it and eventually making it fail altogether. Now, American experts from the Intermountain Medical Center, in Salt Lake City, believe they've just determined the first ever statistical correlation between the condition and the number one form of dementia in the United States, Alzheimer's disease.
The study they published focused on nearly 37,000 people, and was presented at the Heart Rhythm 2009 annual meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Boston, on May 15th. They argue that the connection they've discovered between the two medical conditions is fairly strong, and also that it has never before been thoroughly investigated. The information on which the research was based was drawn from the Intermountain Heart Collaborative Study, which is a-hundred-of-thousand-large database of patients who get treatment in the nationally recognized nonprofit system of hospitals, surgery centers, doctors, and clinics that is Intermountain healthcare.
“Previous studies have shown that patients with atrial fibrillation are at higher risk for some types of dementia, including vascular dementia. But to our knowledge, this is the first large-population study to clearly show that having atrial fibrillation puts patients at greater risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. The study shows a connection between atrial fibrillation and all types of dementia. The Alzheimer's findings – particularly the risk of death for younger patients – break new ground,” the lead researcher of the new study, IMC Cardiologist T. Jared Bunch, MD, explained.
According to official statistics, almost 5.3 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's disease at this point. The condition is a life-altering form of dementia, which results in memory loss, and the incapacity of performing even basic tasks successfully. Currently, the disease is the sixth overall cause of death in the United States. Similarly, atrial fibrillation affects 2.2 million people. Most often, irregularities in its rhythm generate blood pools, or even clots. Strokes are most common when a clot leaves the heart.