Clinical management of atrial fibrillation: need for a comprehensive patient-centered approach.

摘要

A trial fibrillation (AF) is a complex clinical entity. As a matter of fact, clinicians have to deal with a wide range of clinical scenarios related to AF. It is a common observation in daily practice that AF may be the disease itself (recurrent paroxysmal "lone" AF in a healthy patient) or may be associated with minor diseases (high normal thyroid function, subclin-ical atherosclerosis), with facilitating factors (alcohol abuse, smoking, etc), or with another condition that facilitates its occurrence (hypertension, diabetes, obesity, etc). In other cases, AF may present as the complication of another heart disease (coronary heart disease, valvular diseases, various abnormalities leading to heart failure, etc) or may occur in a patient with a major extracardiac disease (neoplasm, cognitive impairment, renal insufficiency, etc) that dominates the clinical picture and strongly influences the patient's outcome.