Auricular fibrillation is so characteristically a condition of adult life and old age that it is scarcely thought of in the consideration of cardiac diseases in childhood. In order to determine its incidence according to age, Cohn tabulated 434 cases of auricular fibrillation which had been reported by Lewis, Frey and Semerau. His table1 did not reveal a single case occurring in patients up to the age of 10 years; only 2 per cent of the patients were between the ages of 10 and 20 years. His observations are epitomized in table 1.
A search of the literature reveals very few reports of children exhibiting auricular fibrillation. Resnick and Scott2 recently reported a case and prefaced their report with a tabulation of all previous instances on record of auricular fibrillation in children 10 years of age or less. Their summary is given as table 2.
REPORT OF CASES