European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA)/Heart Rhythm Society (HRS)/Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Society (APHRS)/Latin American Heart Rhythm Society (LAHRS) expert consensus on risk assessment in cardiac arrhythmias: use the right tool for the right outcome, in the right population
Jens Cosedis Nielsen, Yenn‐Jiang Lin, Márcio Jansen de Oliveira Figueiredo, Alireza Sepehri Shamloo, Alberto Alfie, Serge Bovéda, Nikolaos Dagres, Darío Di Toro, Lee L. Eckhardt, Kenneth A. Ellenbogen, Carina Hardy, Takanori Ikeda, Aparna Jaswal, Elizabeth S. Kaufman, Andrew D. Krahn, Kengo Kusano, Valentina Kutyifa, H. Lim, Gregory Y.H. Lip, Santiago Nava-Townsend, Hui‐Nam Pak, Gerardo Rodríguez-Diez, William H. Sauer, Anil Saxena, Jesper Hastrup Svendsen, Diego Vanegas, Marmar Vaseghi, Arthur A.M. Wilde, T. Jared Bunch, ESC Scientific Document Group, Alfred E. Buxton, Gonzalo Calvimontes, Tze‐Fan Chao, Lars Eckardt, Heidi Estner, Anne M. Gillis, Rodrigo Isa, Josef Kautzner, Philippe Maury, Joshua D. Moss, Gi-Byung Nam, Brian Olshansky, Luis Fernando Pava Molano, Maurício Pimentel, Mukund A. Prabhu, Wendy S. Tzou, Philipp Sommer, J. Swampillai, Alejandro Vidal, Thomas Deneke, Gerhard Hindricks, Christophe Leclercq
Abstract
In clinical practice and for scientific purposes, cardiologists and primary care physicians perform risk assessment in patients with cardiac diseases or conditions with high risk of developing such. The European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA), Heart Rhythm Society (HRS), Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Society (APHRS), and the Latin American Heart Rhythm Society (LAHRS) set down this expert consensus statement task force to summarize the consensus regarding risk assessment in cardiac arrhythmias. Objectives were to raise awareness of using the right risk assessment tool for a given outcome in a given population, and to provide physicians with practical proposals that may lead to rational and evidence-based risk assessment and improvement of patient care in this regard. A large variety of methods are used for risk assessment and choosing the best methods and tools hereof in a given situation is not simple. Even though parameters and test results found associated with increased risk of one outcome (e.g. death) may also be associated with higher risk of other adverse outcomes, specific risk assessment strategies should be used only for the purposes for which they are validated. The work of this task force is summarized in a row of consensus statement tables.