eng Science and Education Publishing American Journal of Cardiovascular Disease Research 2013-11-04 1 1 16 19 10.12691/ajcdr-1-1-4 AJCDR2013114 article Petrit Bara 1 Sokol Myftiu 1 Gentian Vyshka gvyshka@yahoo.com 2 Department of Cardiology, University Hospital Center ‘Mother Theresa’, Faculty of Medicine, University of Medicine in Tirana, Albania Biomedical and Experimental Department, Faculty of Medicine, University of Medicine in Tirana, Albania Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequent arrhythmia, and patients frequently visit emergency departments, where the condition might be diagnosed for the first time. An analysis of factors that might lead a chronic patient to seek urgent medical treatment is important, especially in terms of preventing long-term disability and morbidity. This is even truer for atrial fibrillations, whose complications have a known notoriety and are source of important mortality figures, mainly related to ischemic stroke or more serious consequential cardiac arrhythmias. We have studied paroxysmal AF cases treated during a period of two months in an emergency facility of the University Hospital Centre of Tirana, with 106 patients recruited sequentially in a prospective, open-label and descriptive study. Our data confirmed an important association between overweight and obesity and paroxysmal AF in general, since more than 80% of the patients suffering from this condition had a high body mass index. A thorough discussion of the data, confronted with much larger studies reported from several sources and available actually, is made at the end of the paper. The necessity to re-confirm findings through larger groups of study and through a multi-centre design is formulated. http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajcdr/1/1/4/ajcdr-1-1-4.pdf atrial fibrillation emergency room non-valvular atrial fibrillation risk factors body-mass index