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Atrial fibrillation (A-fib) is a condition of irregular heartbeat, it can leads to cardiovascular events like: stroke, blood clots and heart failure.
The most common treatment for A-fib patients is prescribing anticoagulants, or blood thinners. Some people with A-fib may also have a catheter ablation – a medical procedure that uses energy to damage a small part of heart tissue, thus stopping abnormal electrical signals from traveling through the heart.
Some of the risks associated with cardiac catheter ablation include bleeding or blood vessel damage.
However, as Dr. Jared Bunch – the lead author of the new research – explains, when patients with A-fib have had an ablation and also have a low risk of stroke, physicians prefer to treat them with aspirin instead of blood thinners in order to further reduce the risk of stroke.
In the new study, Dr. Bunch and his colleagues examined the effect of long-term aspirin use on patients with A-fib who underwent an ablation.
Putting their new research into perspective, Dr. Bunch explains, “What was unknown was if aspirin was a safe and effective stroke prevention treatment after an ablation in lower-risk AF [atrial fibrillation] patients.
Aspirin has no benefit for stroke prevention in patients with A- fib. The study examined 4,124 patients with A-fib over a period of 3 years. The participants had a low risk of stroke, and they had undergone catheter ablation.
Dr Bunch and colleagues discovered that patients that used aspiring were significantly more likely to have gastrointestinal and genitourinary bleeding than those who took anticoagulants such as warfarin, or compared with those who did not receive any treatment.
