Arrhythmias & electrophysiologyDiagnostic or prognostic study
Risk of cancer following presentation with new-onset atrial fibrillation using data from UK national databases
- Prediction model development and validation study
- TRIPOD methodology
- ridge-penalized multivariable logistic regression
- 70% derivation / 30% validation
Authors' conclusion
Most of the identified potential risk factors for cancer in the AF population are also associated with cardiovascular disease. The 1-year cancer prediction models showed moderate to good predictive performance
Study context
- Population
- Patients with new atrial fibrillation (AF) and no previous cancer, UK linked primary and secondary care data, January 1998–May 2016
- Participants
- 163,549 patients
- Outcome
- Cancer incidence after AF diagnosis
- Follow-up
- 1 year
Performance
As reported in the abstract
Discrimination of 1-year cancer prediction models (validation set)
- c-statistic, all cancer in men
- 0.69 (0.68-0.70)
- c-statistic, all cancer in women
- 0.63 (0.62-0.65)
- c-statistic, lung cancer
- 0.70 (0.68-0.73)
- c-statistic, colorectal cancer
- 0.70 (0.66-0.73)
- c-statistic, breast cancer
- 0.59 (0.53-0.65)
- c-statistic, prostate cancer
- 0.78 (0.72-0.84)
Further findings
Predictors of cancer
- Age associated with increased risk across all cancer types
- Socioeconomic deprivation, smoking, excessive alcohol intake, family history of cancer, CKD, anaemia and several cancer-related symptoms and signs (e.g. rectal bleeding, loss of appetite) associated with increased risk in ≥1 cancer type
Original publication
Risk of cancer following presentation with new-onset atrial fibrillation using data from UK national databases. Europace. Published 11 December 2025. doi:10.1093/europace/euaf319
Summarised from the published abstract; every number is checked against it