2017/01/01 by Patrick Sulzgruber, Lorenz Koller, Max-Paul Winter +7
paper · doi:10.1160/th16-07-0531
Summary Atrial fibrillation (AF) represents the most common cardiac arrhythmia. Especially in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) the development of AF represents a severe complication resulting in haemodynamic deterioration. While pro-inflammatory cytokines proved to have a pivotal role in the development and progression of both AF and CHF, less attention has been paid to the cellular immunity. Therefore we prospectively enrolled 112 patients with CHF and performed fluorescein-activated cell sorting (FACS). Patients were stratified in two subgroups according to patients presenting with AF (n=56) and patients free of AF (n=56). Comparing AF to non-AF patients we found a significantly lower fraction of regulatory T cells (p Supplementary Material to this article is available online at www.thrombosis-online.com.