June 27 (UPI) -- Research by Stanford University found that patients with atrial fibrillation who received early cardiology care had a reduced risk of stroke.
Atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, increases the risk of stroke and other heart complications, and affects between 3 million and 5 million Americans.
The study found that patients receiving cardiology care within three months of diagnosis of atrial fibrillation had a 9 percent reduction in the risk of stroke and an 11 percent reduction in the risk of death.
Researchers analyzed records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system of 184,161 newly diagnosed patients with atrial fibrillation between 2004 and 2012.
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Approximately 40 percent of patients received cardiology care and 60 percent received primary care within 90 days of diagnosis.
Patients seen by a cardiologist had a lower-adjusted risk of stroke and death, and a lower risk of stroke.
Researchers attribute the the lower risk of stroke with patients being prescribed anticoagulants by cardiologists.
"The important message here is that getting early cardiology care was associated with early prescription of drugs specifically for preventing stroke," Dr. Mintu Turakhia, director of research at the Center for Digital Health at Stanford, and director of cardiac electrophysiology at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System, said in a press release. "These findings show that it is important to think of these interventions at the time of diagnosis."
Researchers also found that patients who received early cardiology care were hospitalized at a higher rate, which may be due to the fact that those patients were often sicker or that therapies requiring hospitalization may be required.
"When you account for everything under the sun -- age, other conditions and medications, insurance coverage and even how far patients lived from these clinics -- there was still a reduction in stroke and mortality," Turakhia said. "To start, the patients who received cardiology care were also a whole lot sicker at baseline, so you'd expect their outcomes to be worse. In fact, we saw the opposite."
The study was published June 26 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
