Left Ventricular Extracellular Volume Expansion Is Not Associated with Atrial Fibrillation or Atrial Fibrillation-mediated Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction

Purpose: To determine whether left ventricular (LV) extracellular volume (ECV) expansion is associated with atrial fibrillation (AF) or AF-mediated LV systolic dysfunction (LVSD) while minimizing the influence of biologic and imaging methodologic confounders.

Materials and methods: This study examined the prevalence of LV ECV expansion in 137 patients with AF (mean age, 62 years ± 11 [standard deviation]; 92 male patients and 45 female patients; 83 paroxysmal and 54 persistent) who underwent preablation cardiovascular MRI. Biologic confounders were minimized by measuring the ECV fraction and excluding patients with severe LV hypertrophy, defined as wall thickness greater than 1.5 cm. Imaging confounders were minimized by using an arrhythmia-insensitive-rapid (AIR) cardiac T1 mapping pulse sequence. Other cardiac functional parameters, including LV ejection fraction (LVEF) and left atrial end-diastolic volume indexed to body surface area, were assessed using cine cardiovascular MRI. A substudy was conducted in 32 patients with no AF (mean age, 54 years ± 16) in sinus rhythm to establish control values and convert these values between the AIR sequence and literature-based modified Look-Locker inversion recovery (MOLLI) values.

Results: The mean ECV was not significantly different (P > .05) between patients with AF with a normal LVEF (24.5% ± 2.8; n = 107), patients with AF with LVSD (24.5% ± 2.5; n = 30), and patients with no AF (24.4% ± 3.8; n = 32), but there was a significant interaction between ECV and CHA₂DS₂-VASc score (P = .045). Compared with the literature data obtained from healthy control patients scanned using MOLLI, 99.3% of patients with AF had ECV below the fibrosis cutoff point (32.8% when converted from MOLLI T1 mapping to AIR T1 mapping), including a subset of patients with AF (n = 28) with low CHA₂DS₂-VASc score (0/1 for men/women).

Conclusion: Study results suggest that an LV ECV expansion is not associated with AF or AF-mediated LVSD. Supplemental material is available for this article. © RSNA, 2020See also the commentary by Stillman in this issue.