Lone or idiopathic atrial fibrillation, messenger of misery in sight

This editorial refers to 'Gender-related differences in risk of cardiovascular morbidity and all-cause mortality in patients hospitalized with incident atrial fibrillation without concomitant diseases: a nationwide cohort study of 9519 patients' by T. Andersson et al. In order to adequately describe root causes and adverse consequences of apparently idiopathic AF, the requested study population has to be large and be followed for a very long time. Andersson et al. adequately deployed the excellent national Swedish health registries in order to cover the hiatus of aforementioned studies in the current idiopathic AF literature. Considering the notion that patients with idiopathic or lone AF have comparable prospects as AF patients overall but are only caught early in their 'arrhythmia and vascular career', the study by Andersson et al. should trigger physicians to give high priority to exposing predisposing factors or early stages of underlying cardiovascular disease in such a way that preventative measures can be accurately deployed in these patients.