For how we live.
A Swiss investigator-led trial tested whether isolating the back wall of the left atrium on top of pulsed-field pulmonary vein isolation cuts arrhythmia recurrence. The primary answer was no.
In the LOSE-AF trial, an eight-month low-calorie programme cut weight by 9.7% in older adults with AF. It did not change their symptoms, their AF burden, or their need for further rhythm treatment.
In 3,000 patients eligible for blood thinners, the device maker's trial found left atrial appendage closure noninferior to anticoagulant drugs, and superior for non-procedure-related bleeding at three years.
SINGLE-AF randomised 1,803 South Koreans with borderline stroke risk to a direct oral anticoagulant or nothing. The drug lowered a composite of stroke, bleeding and death at two years, from 1.5% to 0.5%.
In a two-week trial, 100 adults drank coffee or avoided caffeine on random days. Coffee did not raise the upper-chamber skipped beats it was blamed for — but it nudged up lower-chamber ones and cut sleep.
TRICORDER put an AI-enabled stethoscope into UK primary care. Over a year it did not increase heart-failure diagnoses population-wide, even though the device, when actually used, flagged more disease.
In UK Biobank participants tracked with wrist light sensors, high nighttime light exposure was tied to thickened, weaker heart muscle and 24–33% higher risks of heart attack, stroke and heart failure.
Self-testing and self-managing warfarin cut clot events by roughly 40%, and self-management also lowered deaths — one of the few at-home tests with randomised evidence of real benefit.
Green-light pulse sensors raise a real concern about melanin, but independent tests find the skin-tone effect small next to device and movement errors — and the validation studies barely include darker skin.
Trained on 1.7 million ECGs paired with clinicians' report text, ECG-CLIP reached the same accuracy as the best comparator with about 90% less training data — a bid at the field's labelling bottleneck.
The first double-blind sham-controlled trial of pulmonary vein isolation found quality of life improved in both arms. Most of the benefit patients feel appears not to come from the ablation.
Guidelines have hedged on anticoagulation for people with one stroke risk factor. SINGLE-AF randomised 1,803 patients in South Korea, and the events it counted were very few in both arms.
Comparing US adults vaccinated just before and just after the changeover from the live to the recombinant shingles vaccine, researchers found a 9% lower cardiovascular burden over seven years.
A sibling-controlled cohort of 1.1 million men, a genetic analysis of 712 traits and a UK Biobank study of fitness change converge — and they agree on where the exception is.
Two studies pin down 'holiday heart': one caught alcohol triggering discrete AF events within hours, the other found that quitting cut recurrences by nearly half over six months.
A low-probability alert still sends most recipients to a doctor. Researchers are now naming the flip side of continuous self-monitoring — a device-driven health anxiety they call technohypochondria.
A secondary analysis of the VITAL-AF trial reports a screening benefit only in the top risk decile — with a confidence interval whose lower bound sits at 0.01.
A systematic review of 27 studies finds women reach higher drug concentrations at the same psychotropic dose. A separate review of 103 atrial fibrillation trials finds 43% under-enrolled women against disease prevalence.
The STABLED trial randomized 331 atrial fibrillation patients with a recent stroke to ablation plus anticoagulation or anticoagulation alone. The two groups ended up nearly identical.
In 2,286 patients with sleep apnea undergoing major surgery, a measure of how deeply and how long oxygen fell — not the apnea-hypopnea index — tracked 30-day cardiovascular events and death.
The FDA cleared it to sort one rhythm from one other. It cannot detect a heart attack, and about one reading in eight comes back inconclusive.
Among watch wearers told their pulse looked irregular, a third had atrial fibrillation confirmed on a follow-up ECG patch. Most who were notified did not.
A meta-analysis of 26 studies put pooled sensitivity at 95% and specificity at 97%. Samsung and Withings devices performed comparably to Apple — but the numbers come from people already suspected of arrhythmia.