Lu Dai - Comorbidity patterns inolder adults with atrial fibrillation: a Danish nationwide cohort study

Comorbidity patterns inolder adults with atrial fibrillation: a Danish nationwide cohort study 

Introduction: Patients withatrial fibrillation (AF) often suffer frommultiple comorbiditiesthat impact their health trajectories and challenge the clinical management. We aimed tocharacterizethe comorbidity patternsin older adults with AF.
Methods: We used cross-sectional data derived from the Danish National Patient Register (period 2012-2017) and identified patients³60 years old with AFdiagnosisby 1 January 2017. Chronic conditions coded bythe International Classification of Diseases10th revision were grouped into 60 clinically relevant disease categories.We performed latent class analysis(LCA)to identify homogeneous groups of AF patients with similar underlying disease patterns.We applied two measures, i.e., disease exclusivity >25% and the observed/expected ratio >2,to identify theoverexpresseddiseases in eachclass and to name the disease patterns.
Results: A total of 96,117 AF patients (median age 72 years old; 45% women)wereincluded in the analysis. A six-class patient classification was determined as the optimal output of LCAwith six comorbidity patterns, i.e., cardio-metabolic diseases pattern, neuropsychiatric, metabolic and colitis-related diseasepattern, unspecific pattern, complex disease pattern, cardiovascular diseasepatternand musculoskeletal and peripheral neuropathy disease pattern. Sociodemographic and clinical characteristics were differently distributed across patterns.
Conclusions:The identification and characterization of comorbidity patterns may help to better approach the clinical complexity of multimorbid older adults with AF thus enhancing personalized approaches.