>With due respect to the Cardiogram developers (hi guys) as a doctor I really can't see a huge amount of value in this - my patients who present to emergency departments with paroxysmal AF are all anticoagulanted or on rate control and there has only been one instance in the last 3 years and many thousand patients when someone has presented to emergency and we have had to run through the full spectrum of echo -> anticoagulante -> cardiovert.
Isn't this a version of survivorship bias? Who about to those who aren't that lucky to manage to overcome the attack and become patients...
AF is rarely fatal, although stroke is significantly disabling. Normally (well, I don't have any figure at hand and I'm not about to go and research it at the moment, but I'm using the term in the sense of >50% but <85%) of AF instances come with some sort of symptoms... feeling faint, pounding chest, shortness of breath... good questioning can be fairly diagnostic in the doctors clinic or emergency room. But yes, as the Cardiogram guys point out in their reply to me, and in the source article, a significant number of people have strokes secondary to AF.
Isn't this a version of survivorship bias? Who about to those who aren't that lucky to manage to overcome the attack and become patients...