Family ties play big role in atrial fibrillation
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People who have a close family member with atrial fibrillation are 40 percent more likely to develop the heart condition than other people, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.
And the finding was even stronger for people whose relatives developed the heart rhythm problem at a younger age—before they turned 65.
“It was a threefold increased risk,” Dr. Emelia Benjamin of Boston University School of Medicine, who worked on the study to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study was released early online to coincide with the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.
“When people are younger and they get it, a lot of time people don’t have any other risk factors,” Benjamin said in a telephone interview.
The finding may make it easier to predict who will develop atrial fibrillation or AF, an irregular heartbeat that raises the risk of stroke, Dr. Steven Lubitz of Massachusetts General Hospital told the heart meeting.
Doctors have long known that atrial fibrillation can run in families, but just how much this affects a person’s risk has not been clear.
An estimated 2.2 million Americans have atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart beat in which the heart’s two small upper chambers, the atria, quiver instead of beating efficiently, allowing blood to pool.
This can form clots that travel to the brain and cause strokes. About 15 percent of strokes are caused by atrial fibrillation.
The study involved more than 4,000 people in the Framingham Heart Study, a large, long-running study of people in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Lubitz and colleagues suspected that having a family history of atrial fibrillation would be a good predictor of a person’s risk.
People in the study did not have atrial fibrillation when they started, and each person had at least one parent or sibling enrolled in the study.
They found that AF occurred about 40 percent more frequently among people who had a family member with atrial fibrillation than among people with no close family members with AF, even when accounting for other known risk factors.
“I think it is yet another piece of evidence that knowing your family history can be helpful in assessing your risk of various conditions,” Benjamin said.
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By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO
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