Atrial Fibrillation Awareness – Empowering the patient

Dhanunjaya Lakkireddy, Andrea Natale


Dear colleagues

Welcome to the Fall issue of the Journal of Atrial Fibrillation. Thank you for your fight against the global epidemic of Atrial Fibrillation (AF). September was the AF month with several activities organized all over the world. There were educational lectures, awareness walks, yoga sessions and many other activities to raise the AF awareness in the community. A lot of you have been part of this mission with single goal of eliminating AF.

Congratulations are to the Global AF Alliance (GAFA) Foundation, Heart Rhythm Society (HRS) and ACC for launching a very effective campaign last month. HRS did an excellent Twitter Question and Answer session with an expert panel. A wide variety of clinical management issues have been discussed. Controversial areas were covered and debated. GAFA and ACC did a patient oriented Webinar on AF Management. In addition to this Apple along with Alive or launched a massive online AF awareness program as well. While some people viewed this as a marketing gimmick, it still brings a tremendous value to the core mission of spreading the knowledge and improving patient engagement. What Coronary artery disease (CAD) was thirty years ago is AF today. It takes unfettered commitment from all fronts to fight this 21st century epidemic.

While our understanding of AF and its maladies continue to improve the tools to manage them are slowly but steadily becoming better. AF ablation remains a very important tool in out therapeutic armamentarium. Our ability to tackle non-paroxysmal AF has been limited. In addition to the pulmonary vein isolation several adjunctive strategies have been tested and failed. Complex fractionated electrograms, linear lines, rotor ablation and more have been tried without much success. Our ability to understand the pathophysiology and substrate evolution with the progressive AF will remain the next best hope. Several new options in the form of left atrial appendage (LAA) occluders for anticoagulation eligible high-risk patients have proven to be very promising.

This issue of the journal has several interesting original and review articles worth spending time on. We once again appreciate your support to the journal and look forward to your contributions to the field

Best wishes




Dhanunjaya (DJ)Lakkireddy MD, FACC, FHRS Associate Editor JAFIB



Andrea Natale MD, FACC, FHRS, FESC Editor-in-Chief JAFIB