Female “Paradox” in Atrial Fibrillation—Role of Left Truncation Due to Competing Risks

Female sex in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) is a controversial and paradoxical risk factor for stroke—controversial because it increases the risk of stroke only among older women of some ethnicities and paradoxical because it appears to contradict male predominance in cardiovascular diseases. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. We conducted simulations to examine the hypothesis that this sex difference is generated non-causally through left truncation due to competing risks (CR) such as coronary artery diseases, which occur more frequently among men than among women and share common unobserved causes with stroke. We modeled the hazards of stroke and CR with correlated heterogeneous risk. We assumed that some people died of CR before AF diagnosis and calculated the hazard ratio of female sex in the left-truncated AF population. In this situation, female sex became a risk factor for stroke in the absence of causal roles. The hazard ratio was attenuated in young populations without left truncation and in populations with low CR and high stroke incidence, which is consistent with real-world observations. This study demonstrated that spurious risk factors can be identified through left truncation due to correlated CR. Female sex in patients with AF may be a paradoxical risk factor for stroke.