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0:00
Hello,
I'm David Spence.
I'm from the Robarts
Research Institute
at Western University
in London, Canada,
and I'll be talking about
some new evidence and insights
regarding atrial
fibrillation, anticoagulants,
and vitamins for homocysteine.
0:17
This slide shows a list of all
the talks in the stroke series,
and they're all available online.
0:25
My disclosures are
listed on this slide.
And there are no disclosures
that are relevant to this talk,
except in the second
line, I have received
honoraria from Bayer and
Boehringer-Ingelheim and Pfizer.
0:40
So why is atrial fibrillation
increasingly important now?
It's because the
population is aging,
especially in developed countries.
The top section of this slide shows
the change in age distribution
in the Canadian population with
a huge increase in elderly people
because of the arrival of
the pig and the python,
the big boom and the baby boomers.
And stroke goes up
very steeply with age,
more so than myocardial infarction.
It's also commoner in women
than myocardial infarction,
partly because women live longer.
1:12
So in the Framingham Study, at
age 50, only 1.5% of stroke
was attributable to
atrial fibrillation,
but by age 80 to 89,
it was 23.5%.
And we now recognize that it's
really a higher proportion
because a lot of intermittent
atrial fibrillation
was missed in the past.
1:32
So here's a projection
of the expected number
of adults with atrial
fibrillation in the United States,
going from 1995 to 2050.
And it's more than a doubling
expected in atrial fibrillation.
