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Comment & Response
March 20, 2019

Interpretation of Studies on the Occurrence of Atrial Fibrillation in Elite Athletes

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC–University Medical Center Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
  • 2Department of Cardiology, Erasmus MC–University Medical Center Rotterdam, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
  • 3Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts
JAMA Cardiol. 2019;4(4):392. doi:10.1001/jamacardio.2019.0382

To the Editor We read the epidemiological work by Boraita et al1 with great interest. The article aims “to determine AF [atrial fibrillation] incidence in a large cohort of elite athletes” and concludes that “the incidence of AF is low among young elite athletes.”1 However, the authors do not present any incidence data to answer the research question or support their conclusion. In fact, the authors present prevalence estimates of AF in elite Spanish athletes referred for cardiological screening; they observed that 21 of 6813 athletes (0.3%) had a diagnosis of AF during their final examination.

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