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Updated: Apr 26, 2026

Estimating Bilateral Atrial Function by Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Feature Tracking in Patients with Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation
Published on: July 20, 2022
Fragmented QRS and prediction of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation episodes
Ahmet Temiz1, Emine Gazi2, Omer Güngör3
1Ahmet Temiz, MD, Assistant Professor of Cardiology, Çanakkale 18 Mart University Medical Faculty, Çanakkale, Turkey.
Objective:
Prior studies have demonstrated the relationship between cardiovascular diseases and fragmented QRS (fQRS). fQRS was also associated with ventricular arrhythmias. Our objective was to find out the relationship between fQRS and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (PAF).
Method:
A total of 301 patients without overt structural heart disease were prospectively included in the study. Patients were divided in to 2 groups according to presence of fQRS. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to assess the predictive value of fQRS for predicting PAF.
Results:
One hundred and three patients had fQRS. Patients with fQRS were older (53±16.8 vs 45.3±17.2, p<0.001), with larger left atrium (LA) (33.2±5.9 vs 30.1±5.9 mm, p=0.001), with thicker interventricular septum (IVS) (10.2±1.9 vs 9.5±2.3 mm, p=0.032), more diabetic (19.8 vs 10.6%, p=0.029) and have more PAF episodes (22.3 vs 4.1%, p<0.001) in comparison with patients without fQRS. fQRS was an independent predictor of detecting PAF episode (odds ratio, 9.69; 95% confidence interval, 2.46-38.15, p=0.001). Hypertension and diabetes mellitus were also predictive.
Conclusion:
The presence of fQRS independently predicted PAF episodes in holter monitoring (HM). Further studies are needed to clarify the clinical implications of this finding.
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