More evidence on an abominable pairing: atrial fibrillation and kidney disease.
More evidence on an abominable pairing: atrial fibrillation and kidney disease.
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更多关于令人厌恶的配对的证据:心房颤动和肾脏疾病。
DOI:
10.1161/circulationaha.112.000640
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发表时间:
2013
期刊:
影响因子:
37.8
通讯作者:
Winkelmayer,WolfgangC
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Winkelmayer,WolfgangC
Winkelmayer Atrial Fibrillation and ESRD Incidence 561 conditions, biometric parameters including blood pressure, serum hemoglobin, and dipstick proteinuria measurements, and use of several cardiovascular medications. More than 206 000 individuals with eGFR< 60 mL/min/1.73 m2 but without end-stage renal disease and free of previously diagnosed atrial fibrillation were identified and included in the cohort. The unadjusted analysis showed that person-time spent with atrial fibrillation was associated with a small but significant 18% increment in the rate of incident end-stage renal disease. However, adjustment for the measured potential confounders, some of which were time-dependent, yielded an almost 4-times larger estimate of association, suggesting that person-time spent after diagnosis of atrial fibrillation was associated with a 67% higher rate of end-stage renal disease when taking into account other relevant factors. Although this finding is qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the study by Watanabe et al8 (in which atrial fibrillation was associated with an increased incidence of the eGFR end point by 80% and the proteinuria end point by 116% in adjusted analyses), the strong confounding toward the null, removed by multivariable adjustment, is striking, unusual, and should require further consideration.If an unadjusted estimate of an association toward higher risk among exposed individuals increases after multivariable adjustment, it usually means that exposed individuals were systematically healthier compared with unexposed individuals on some or all of the observed potential confounders of the association. This means that patients (or rather, person-time spent) with reduced eGFR and atrial fibrillation must have been healthier than patients (or person-time spent) without atrial fibrillation. This seems a bit counterintuitive given what we know about risk factors for atrial fibrillation, although we learn that younger age was associated with an increased risk of incident atrial fibrillation in the study cohort.(This may perhaps be an indication of informative censoring in that older patients with chronic kidney disease who are more likely to die have less opportunity to experience atrial fibrillation, death and, perhaps, outmigration from the health care system being competing risks.) In a cohort study with time-invariant exposure one can usually glean any differences between exposed and unexposed individuals from a typical table 1. Unfortunately, such information is not available in studies with time-varying exposure, as is the case here. It would have been useful, however, to provide additional estimates of the association from models that included only single or more restricted sets of potential confounders to understand which factors (jointly) drove this relatively large underestimation of the association in unadjusted comparison. What are the possible explanations for this increased incidence of end-stage renal disease in patients with reduced eGFR who developed atrial fibrillation? Residual confounding is certainly a possibility, as acknowledged by the authors, but given the direction of the confounding by already observed characteristics, it does not seem that one needs to be concerned about missing information on severity of comorbidities whose presence was only ascertained. One possible candidate, however, is rate of decline of kidney function, which has evolved as an independent risk factor for a number of cardiovascular outcomes, independent of the level of eGFR. 9, 10 It is conceivable