Incidence and prevalence of atrial fibrillation: an analysis based on 8.3 million patients

Based on an analysis of claims-based data of 8.298 million members of two German statutory health insurance funds, the aim of this contribution is to quantify age-/gender-specific prevalence/incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF) in a German setting. Patients were classified as AF prevalent, if they had received at least two outpatient diagnoses of AF (ICD10-Code I48.1-) in two different quarters of the year and/or had received at least one main AF diagnosis during inpatient treatment between 1 January 2007 and 12 December 2008. They were considered to have had new onset AF in 2008 under the following conditions; first, there was no AF diagnosis in 2007; secondly, patients had not received oral anticoagulant medication in 2007; and thirdly, patients had received either one inpatient/two outpatient diagnoses of AF in 2008. In our sample, a total of 176 891 patients had AF. AF prevalence was 2.132. The average age of these AF patients was 73.1 years, and 55.5 (98 190 patients) were male. The incidence of AF in our sample was 4.358 cases/1000 person-years in men and 3.868 cases/1000 person-years in women. A comparison of the distribution of AF prevalence/incidence in our population with that in already published studies showed that our figures were higher, especially in the age groups above 70 years. Our data show that in a large industrial nation such as Germany care provision structures are going to be challenged by a requirement to treat more AF patients in the future.