Impact of estimated glomerular filtration rate on long-term clinical outcomes among Chinese patients with atrial fibrillation

BACKGROUND: Estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) is a widely accepted indicator of renal function. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between eGFR and 3-year clinical outcomes among Chinese patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). METHODS: We retrospectively studied 433 consecutive Chinese patients with AF (51.0% males, mean age 65.6 ± 13.2 years) between February 2013 and December 2017. Baseline clinical data were collected according to medical records. eGFR was calculated by MDRD equation for Chinese patients according to baseline age, sex and serum creatinine. The primary clinical outcome of interest was all-cause mortality. RESULTS: During a median follow-up period of 3.1 (0.5–4.5) years, 73 deaths (16.9%) were recorded. Multivariate Cox regression analyses indicated that eGFR was independently associated with all-cause death in total population [hazard ratio (HR) 0.984; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.972–0.995, P = 0.006] and patients free of valvular heart diseases (VHDs) (HR 0.975; 95% CI 0.959–0.992, P = 0.003), but not with VHDs. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that reduced eGFR predicted all-cause mortality with areas under the ROC curve of 0.637 (95% CI 0.539–0.735, P = 0.004) in AF patients free of VHDs. CONCLUSIONS: eGFR is an independent predictor of 3-year all-cause mortality among Chinese patients with AF, especially among those patients free of VHDs.