Atrial fibrillation, comorbidities and new anticoagulants

The atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most important cause of arythmia and cerebrovascular disease in clinical practice. Comorbidity is defined as the association of active chronical diseases and a target disease. comparison between burden illness of the patients in interventional (n=4) and observational studies, form Medline database (n=4), was performed. the level of comorbidity tend to be higher in patients from interventional than large observational studies. in interventional studies, the level cerebro-vascular risk was calculated to compare interventional and control groups. So contrary to what was expected the patients of the general population who can receive anticoagulants have a lesser burden of illness. A recent paper studying new anticoagulants in general population finds this difference again, and would indicate that the risk related to the use of new anticoagulants would not be upper to that observed in the princeps pivotal studies.