Adequacy of Dialysis and Incidence of Atrial Fibrillation in Patients Undergoing Hemodialysis.

Background: Atrial fibrillation (AF) can lead to stroke, heart failure, and mortality and has a greater prevalence in dialysis patients than in the general population. Several studies have suggested that uremic toxins may contribute to the development of AF. However, the association between dialysis adequacy and incident AF has not been well established.

Methods: In this retrospective nationwide cohort study, we analyzed data from the Korean National Periodic Hemodialysis Quality Assessment from 2013 to 2015 of patients who received outpatient maintenance hemodialysis 3× a week. The main exposure was single pooled Kt/V (spKt/V), which is the dialysis adequacy index, and the primary outcome was the development of AF. For the primary analysis, patients were categorized into quartiles according to baseline spKt/V. The lowest quartile, representing the lowest adequacy, was used as the reference group. Fine-Gray subdistribution hazard models were used, treating all-cause mortality as a competing risk.

Results: Of 25 173 patients, the mean age was 60 (51-69) years, and 14 772 (58.7%) were men. During a median follow-up of 5.7 years, incident AF occurred in a total of 3883 (15.4%) patients. Participants with a higher spKt/V tended to have lower AF incidence. In survival analysis, a graded association was observed between the risk of incident AF and spKt/V quartiles: subdistribution hazard ratios and 95% CIs for the second, third, and the highest quartile compared with the lowest quartile were 0.90 (95% CI, 0.82-0.98), 0.84 (95% CI, 0.77-0.93), and 0.79 (95% CI, 0.72-0.88), respectively.

Conclusions: This nationwide cohort study showed that a higher spKt/V is associated with a reduced risk of incident AF. These findings suggests that reducing uremic toxin burden through enhanced dialysis clearance may be associated with a lower risk of AF development in patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis.