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Hi everyone, this is John Mandrola from the Heart.org Medscape Cardiology and this is this week in

Cardiology for November 1st, 2019.

This week, AF oblation, cardiac rehab, hyper Hypertrophic Cardiopathy, and Clinician Wellness. Q, a mere few weeks after my column on paying attention to the asymmetric downside risks of

AF oblation, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology publishes an observational

study of mortality after AF oblation.

The authors, mostly from the Wild Cornell Medical College in New York,

used a readmissions database of adults from 2010 to 2015 who had an AF ablation.

The total number of administrative records from the database was large.

It was greater than 60,000 patients.

And hospitals were stratified by volume, turtiles, low volume, middle volume, and high volume.

The primary end point of the study was all-cause mortality, which was defined

as death during the initial hospitalization or a readmission within 30 days of the procedure. Early mortality occurred in 46 per 1,000 cases.

To be clear, my friends, this is almost 1 in 200 patients dying early after an AF oblation.

Shockingly, figures 2 and 3 in the paper show that the quarterly rates of early mortality and complications after AF ablation increased

...