Atrial Fibrillation Linked to Lower Thought Performance in Men

by: AFAnswers.com staff

Forgotten car keys and lowered attention spans seem to be an all too common occurrence in today’s society, but could Atrial Fibrillation be contributing to lowered cognitive performance?

A research team at Boston University has found a link between the common heart arrhythmia and lowered mental ability. 9 During a recent study, the researchers found that men with AF (women were not included in the study due to a low incidence of AF) performed lower on several mental ability tests than men without AF, specifically in the areas of visual organization, memory, attention and concentration.

Using a subset of male participants from the Framingham Offspring Study — part of the long-time running Framingham Heart Study that examines the prevalence of AF — researchers evaluated the cognitive performance of 1,011 men with the Framingham Offspring cognitive test battery. Study results showed that men with the arrhythmia, but not suffering from dementia or stroke, scored significantly lower on tests that involved abstract reasoning, visual memory, visual organization, verbal memory, scanning and tracking, and executive functioning.

While the cause for the reduced cognition is not made clear by the study, several contributing factors have been suggested, including undiagnosed stroke, lesions in the brain or reduced cardiac output, signaling the need to conduct additional studies that lead to a better understanding of the link and its cause.

Published: January 1, 2007