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Brief description/objective

Contemporary findings from the ongoing Swiss-AF cohort study (2’415 patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) enrolled, 1’760 patients with available brain imaging) showed that patients with AF have a high burden of cerebral infarcts and other brain lesions on systematic brain MRI screening associated with a quite significant decline in neurocognitive function. Moreover, the majority of cerebral infarcts were clinically silent, and they had a similar impact on cognitive dysfunction as clinically overt events. However, since cardiovascular
comorbidity is very common in this well characterized AF population, the possibly causal role of AF cannot be distinguished since no comparison to patients in normal sinus rhythm is available. Therefore, it is planned to initiate a large Swiss-AF Control study to obtain an appropriate control group of patients in sinus rhythm, which can be followed and compared
to AF patients in the Swiss-AF main cohort using the existing Swiss-AF network structure.