A new study on atrial fibrillation (AF) prevalence in dementia patients confirms older research linking the heart condition with higher susceptibility to dementia. The significance of the investigation is the scale of the analysis because previous studies were mixed and not conclusive. Larger longitudinal studies with a follow-up over a long period of time have not been done before. More importantly, the beneficial role that oral anticoagulants (blood thinners) play in reducing the incidence of dementia by treating AF first was confirmed by researchers at Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 2.7 to 6.1 million Americans are afflicted with AF and the numbers are only bound to increase with the aging population growing. It is the most common type of arrhythmia, a condition characterized by irregular heart beat, and affects approximately 2 percent of people younger than 65 and 9 percent of people above 65 years of age. Since forty million people worldwide suffer from dementia, examining the association of the condition with AF could potentially bring that number down, given that dementia still remains an untreatable condition. A study published in the European Heart Journal on June 18 documented the relationship between the two diseases. Specifically, incidences where AF precludes dementia were studied from data available in the Korea National Health Insurance Service Senior Cohort. The NHIS-Senior database has information pertaining to medical records, socioeconomic backgrounds and insurance on 5.1 million or 10 percent of the elderly population in South Korea aged above 60 in 2002. Source
