Loading...
Identifying occult atrial fibrillation (AF) is important for optimizing secondary prevention after ischemic stroke because its presence typically justifies anticoagulation rather than antiplatelet therapy. However, prolonged cardiac monitoring to detect brief episodes of asymptomatic AF can be inconvenient for patients and expensive for healthcare systems. Developing a reliable method to identify stroke patients most likely (or least likely) to benefit from such monitoring could yield key practical benefits. To this end, investigators evaluated a set of variables to identify patients at low risk for AF who may forgo prolonged cardiac monitoring. Clinical variables included age, NIH Stroke Scale score, lipid-lowering therapy, creatinine, and…