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Nearly all treatment trials of atrial fibrillation (AF) involve patients with AF that was clinically diagnosed, either because of symptoms or through electrocardiograms (ECGs) at clinical visits. It is not clear that incidentally found AF, either through implanted devices or specially designed screening programs, is equivalent in significance to clinical AF. In the partly industry-supported SCREEN-AF study (NCT02392754), 856 patients without diagnosed AF, aged over 75 and with hypertension (and thus having a minimal CHA2DS2-VASC score of 3), were randomized to an AF screening program or standard care.
The screening program included 2 weeks of patch continuous ECG monitoring at baseline and at 3 months; during those periods, the screened pati…