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The incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF) is higher in patients with diabetes than in other people, but is this risk due to diabetes itself or to related risk factors? In this analysis of 34,720 participants in the Women's Health Study, 937 (2.7%) women reported having type 2 diabetes at baseline. Median follow-up of the entire cohort was 16 years.
After adjustment for age, diabetic participants were more likely to have AF (hazard ratio, 1.95). Adjusting for other baseline differences lowered this HR to 1.37, and adjusting further for changes in AF risk factors (such as hypertension and obesity) during the study lowered the HR to 1.14, which was statistically nonsignificant.