CONTEXT Although the heritability of atrial fibrillation (AF) is established, the contribution of familial AF to predicting new-onset AF remains unknown. OBJECTIVE To determine whether familial occurrence of AF is associated with new-onset AF beyond established risk factors. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS The Framingham Heart Study, a prospective community-based cohort study started in 1...

BACKGROUND Inducibility of atrial fibrillation (AF) after pulmonary vein isolation has been used to guide additional left atrial ablation in paroxysmal AF. The sensitivity and specificity of AF induction in this setting remains uncertain. We examined the incidence and characteristics of inducible AF in patients without structural heart disease or clinical AF and the effect of different inductio...

The discovery of the potent mutagenicity of AF-2, which was once used in Japan as a food preservative, has exerted a great influence not only on screening procedures for carcinogenic compounds but also on legislative approaches to mutagenic substances. It promoted the synthesis of exceedingly sensitive and reliable tester strains in Salmonella and supported the hypothesis of a common mechanism ...

In this issue of the Netherlands Heart Journal, Gal et al. provide an analysis of patients included in the On-TIME II study, in which patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention for ST-elevation MI (STEMI) were randomly assigned to tirofiban or placebo treatment on top of usual medical treatment [7, 8]. The authors confirm the relation between AF and mortality in this setting...

BACKGROUND Heart failure (HF) and atrial fibrillation (AF) share common risk factors and often coexist. The combination of HF and AF may carry a worse prognosis than either condition alone; however, the magnitude of this risk remains controversial and it is not known whether the timing of AF influences the risk of death. METHODS AND RESULTS We determined the risk of all-cause mortality in rel...

Who gets AF? The risk of developing AF rises with age. At the age of 40, this risk of developing AF rises to one in four people and the risk continues to increase with age.5 What are the symptoms of AF? People with AF often experience distressing symptoms including palpitations, chest pain, breathlessness, fatigue or light-headedness. However, some people don’t even feel anything when they have...

BACKGROUND Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly encountered arrhythmia and is associated with an elevated risk of stroke. Improving the identification of patients with the highest risk for AF to enable appropriate surveillance and treatment, if necessary, is critical to reducing AF-associated morbidity and mortality. Multiple common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are unequivoca...

AIM To evaluate the correlation among changes in fundus autofluorescence (AF) measured using infrared fundus AF (IR-AF) and short-wave length fundus AF (SW-AF) with changes in spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) and fluorescein angiography (FA) in central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC). METHODS Two hundred and twenty consecutive patients with CSC were included. In addition t...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine if: 1) insulin-like growth factor binding protein-1 (IGFBP-1) in amniotic fluid (AF) exhibited proteolytic cleavage in cases of intra-amniotic inflammation; and 2) if the matrix metalloproteinases (MMP-3, MMP-8, MMP-9) in AF are associated with the degradation of IGFBP-1 in AF. METHODS AF samples (n=20) were obtained from preterm gestations...