TUESDAY, Nov. 21, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The irregular heartbeat known as atrial fibrillation ("a-fib") is common after many heart surgeries, and doctors have tended to view it as transient and harmless.
That may not be the case when it comes to surgeries to repair the heart's valves, however.
New research suggests folks who develop post-op a-fib in these cases have poorer outcomes and survival.
“Our results suggest that postoperative atrial fibrillation is more harmful that people once thought,” first author Dr. Whitney Fu said in a University of Michigan news release. She's a general surgery resident at University of Michigan Health in Ann Arbor.
The new study was published recently in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.
In their research, Fu and colleagues tracked patient outcomes for nearly five months among more than 900 people who underwent mitral valve surgeries between 2011 and 2022.
The mitral valve helps control "inflow" to the left side of the heart.
None of the patients had any history of heart arrhythmias prior to their surgeries, but 39% went on to develop a-fib after their operation, the team said. About a quarter of those patients developed the irregular heartbeat within a month of their surgery.
People with post-op a-fib had more than triple the risk of developing permanent atrial fibrillation, compared to people without this post-surgical complication, the team noted.
In turn, people who developed permanent a-fib after their valve surgery faced a nearly fourfold risk of a "neurological event" such as stroke, the Michigan researchers reported.
Overall, the risk of dying during the study period for those who developed post-op a-fib was nearly double that of those whose heart rhythms remained healthy, Fu's group found.
“We are seeing a strong negative influence of post-op Afib on survival that is consistent with past research," Fu said in the news release.
Further study would be beneficial, another researcher added.
“This high rate of atrial fibrillation after valve surgery and its potential severe downstream outcomes should encourage more research into the cause and prevention of postoperative Afib, as well as the development of guidelines to manage the condition,” senior author Dr. Steven Bolling, cardiac surgeon at the Frankel Cardiovascular Center and professor of surgery at U-M Medical School, said in the news release.
More information
Find out more about atrial fibrillation at the American Heart Association.
SOURCE: Michigan Medicine, news release, Nov. 16, 2023
