Atrial fibrillation was defined as arrhythmia at admission and it was not distinguished whether it was a type of paroxysmal, persistent or permanent.The AHEAD main registry included 4,153 patients hospitalized at seven Cardiology Departments with Catheterization Laboratory facilities in four cities. Data were collected prospectively from September 2006 until October selleck compound 2009 using a database accessible via the Internet website http://www.ahead.registry.cz, and were evaluated continuously (including in-hospital mortality). The long-term mortality was followed using a centralized database of the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic and will be published separately. Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects.

The study protocol complied with the Declaration of Helsinki, and was approved by the local Ethics Committee of the Faculty Hospital Brno (Brno, Czech Republic).Statistical analysisStatistical analyses were performed by the Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses of Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic). Standard summary statistics were used to describe primary data, absolute and relative frequencies, median, the 5th to 95th percentile range, arithmetic means and standard deviation. The statistical significance of differences between groups of patients in continuous parameters was tested using the Mann-Whitney U test. The Fisher exact test and maximum likelihood c2 test were applied for the analyses of differences in some of the categories.

The relationship between hospital mortality and its potential predictors was analyzed by univariate logistic regression and described by odds ratios, their 95% confidence intervals (CI) and corresponding statistical significance. Multivariate logistic regression combining expert selection of predictors with a forward stepwise selection algorithm was used for the definition of the multivariate model for in-hospital mortality.A level of �� = 0.05 was used as the boundary for statistical significance in all analyses. Due to the large sample size, all statistical results were interpreted with respect to their clinical significance. Statistical analyses were undertaken Carfilzomib using the SPSS 18.0.3 statistical package (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA).ResultsBaseline characteristicsOf 4,153 patients, 526 (12.7%) died during hospitalization.