Video Categories: Surgeon Interviews, Maze Procedure, Research Alerts
1,926 YouTube Views - Published June 10, 2019
Featured Speaker: Dr. Patrick McCarthy
Video Overview
How prevalent is Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) in patients before cardiac surgery? How often is AFib treated during mitral valve surgery, aortic valve surgery, and coronary artery bypass surgery? Get those answers and more from Dr. Patrick McCarthy in his new video that reviews "Prevalence of atrial fibrillation before cardiac surgery and factors associated with concomitant ablation," his new article featured in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.
Video Transcript
For the hearing impaired members of the AFibSurgeons.org community, we have provided a written transcript of Dr. McCarthy's video below:
Dr. Patrick McCarthy: Recently, we did a report looking at the frequency of atrial fibrillation before coronary bypass surgery, aortic valve surgery and mitral valve surgery. What we found is that it was far more frequent than we would have thought in the Medicare population. It’s not always detected before surgery. Then also what we are a little surprised at is how infrequently it’s treated. In mitral valve surgery about 35% but in the others, only about 20%. There’s a big gap between what we recommend as a society and what the surgeons are actually doing.
The recommendation would be for education of the surgeons. There’s new, better, quicker, easier ways and safer ways to do the operation, so we’re very actively encouraging the surgeons to learn about that.
At Northwestern Memorial Hospital, we embraced this early. We did some of the earlier research on it and we’ve developed some of the techniques for how you can treat it quickly and easily and safely for patients. For us, 97% of patients with mitral surgery have the AFib treated and for the other group, it’s a little more complicated, bypass and aortic valve, but it’s still about 70%, 80%, so most are treated.
