ShareThisSALT LAKE CITY - Curing a common heart-rhythm disorder can prevent premature death, strokes and dementia for some patients, according to Utah researchers.
Atrial fibrillation can be treated with a $30,000-$40,000 procedure called catheter ablation. Energy is sent through a catheter placed in the heart, destroying parts of the heart tissue that cause the arrhythmia.
Intermountain Healthcare doctors and scientists have found that the procedure eliminates atrial fibrillation for most patients -- and reduces their previously increased risk of other serious health complications.
"If we can cure patients of atrial fibrillation, their long-term risk of these bad things happening is as if they never had atrial fibrillation to begin with," said John Day, lead researcher and cardiologist at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah.
Atrial fibrillation is a type of arrhythmia in which the heart's two small upper chambers quiver instead of beat properly. It can be treated with medications or the catheter-ablation procedure. Some 2.2 million Americans have the disorder.
Intermountain researchers previously found that patients with atrial fibrillation were at a significantly higher risk of dying prematurely and of developing strokes, dementia and Alzheimer's.
That study raised the question of whether treating the heart disorder would prevent the other problems.
Using a database of nearly 38,000 Intermountain patients, researchers compared heart-disorder patients who received a catheter to those who took medication and to patients who didn't have the disorder. All groups were matched by age and gender, and they were followed for three years.
Ablation cured the heart disorder in 80 percent of the patients who had the procedure, according to the studies.
Six percent of ablation patients died within three years, compared to 23.5 percent of medication-only patients and 9 percent of patients without heart disorder.
In addition, 0.2 percent of ablation patients developed Alzheimer's -- lower than the 0.9 percent of the medication-only heart patients and 0.5 percent of non-heart patients who developed the disease.
Day said the medications likely didn't reduce the occurrence of dementia and premature death because the drugs usually lose their effectiveness at treating arrhythmia after a couple of years.
He suspects curing the heart disorder with ablation reduced the risks of other complications because atrial fibrillation can cause blood to clot, which can lead to strokes. The body's inflammatory response to the rhythm disorder could also injure the brain, leading to dementia.
"You can't just think of the heart in one category and the brain in another," Day said. "They're intertwined."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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