15 Ischaemic events in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patients with and without atrial fibrillation: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction/ObjectivesHypertrophic cardiomyopathy predisposes to acute cerebrovascular events including ischaemic stroke, transient ischaemic attack and systemic thromboembolism. Atrial fibrillation confers even higher risk. We aim to report the incidence of these complications and to investigate the impact of atrial fibrillation on the prognosis of patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.MethodsA literature search was performed on PubMed, Scopus, Embase/ Ovid and Cochrane library from inception to 20th March 2021. We compared the incidence of ischaemic strokes, transient ischaemic attack, non-specified thromboembolism events and systemic thromboembolism in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy patients with or without atrial fibrillation. Non-specified thromboembolism events in our paper referred to thromboembolic events whereby their types were not specified in the studies. Meta-analysis was performed using StataSE 16 software, and heterogeneity was assessed using I2 test.ResultsA total of 713 studies were identified. Thirty-five articles with 42,570 patients were included. The pooled incidence of stroke/ transient ischaemic attack was 7.45% (95% confidence interval [CI] 5.80–9.52, p