Prospective data from Busselton, Western Australia, collected during triennial surveys from 1966-81 with follow-up of subjects to 1983, showed that atrial fibrillation (AF) was frequent in elderly people and associated with increased mortality. Of 1770 people aged over 60 years, 40 were in atrial fibrillation when first seen and a further 47 developed it during follow-up. Atrial fibrillation was positively associated with angina, history of a myocardial infarction and left bundle branch block. Relative mortality in those with atrial fibrillation compared with those without it, was 1.92 for all causes, 1.82 for death from cardiovascular causes (excluding stroke) and 3.78 for deaths from stroke, after adjustment by proportional hazards regression for confounding effects of age, sex, history of a myocardial infarction, an abnormal electrocardiogram, angina, cholesterol level systolic blood pressure and Quetelet's Index (weight/height2). The excess relative mortality declined with increasing age for both women and men. This raised relative mortality remained constant with time from the first detection of AF for all causes and cardiovascular causes but appeared to increase with time from detection for stroke death. The risk of death from stroke was greatest in the younger women. The observed risk of death from stroke in patients with AF suggests that anticoagulant use should be considered in selected patients.
Remote dietary intakes may be more important than recent diet in the etiology of cancer because of the long latency in cancer development. We examined the reliability of remote dietary recall over 10 y. Subjects were 56 adults participating in a cancer prevention trial in Western Australia. All subjects completed a 28-d diet record (DR) in 1991. A food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) modified to ask respondents about their diet 10 y earlier was sent to each subject for completion in 2001. Remote intakes recalled from 10 y earlier using the FFQ were compared with the DR using the limits of agreement (LOA) method and Pearson correlation coefficients. Mean intakes of most nutrients did not differ between dietary methods. The LOA indicated that the FFQ could under- or overestimate DR estimates by >/=50%. For many nutrients, agreement between methods depended on the magnitude of intake. Pearson's correlation coefficients ranged from 0.02 for retinol to 0.66 for alcohol. These findings are similar to those of other studies that examined the reliability of recent and remote dietary intakes. They also show that using this FFQ, remote diet recalled from 10 y earlier may be as reliable as recent dietary recall.
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