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Dr. Curtis, what are the lifestyle modifications
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that you discuss with your patients?
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There are a few things you might consider doing.
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Certainly if someone is smoking they shouldn't be smoking,
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for a whole host of reasons
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including risk of stroke and atrial fibrillation.
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But aside from that, if you have hypertension
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then modifying the salt in your diet may be somewhat helpful in keeping your blood pressure normal.
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If you have sleep apnea, the disorder where you tend to stop breathing at night and that's been diagnosed,
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then there are treatments that can help with that,
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various kinds of machines that are used at night to help prevent the stopping of the breathing.
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So that's one thing you can do
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Interestingly, extreme exercise sometimes is related to the development of atrial fibrillation,
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and that’s rare but it does happen
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and in those cases then maybe backing off a bit can be helpful in preventing it.
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But I think what are the most important points to make about this is that
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there are many patients who's atrial fibrillation comes and goes,
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and it has absolutely nothing to do with lifestyle,
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and so the idea that just modifying a lifestyle or sticking to a particular diet or something like
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that is going to cure this is probably unrealistic in most people.
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I agree.
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And I think within the treatment of atrial fibrillation, the most important thing they need to adhere to is
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if it's appropriate for them to take the chronic anticoagulation blood thinners, to prevent strokes.
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Right, and even if we know that someone's had atrial fibrillation before,
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even if they seem to be doing well now,
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and they're not having symptomatic recurrences, they need to stay on those blood thinners.
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And particularly a point I don’t think we've emphasized enough yet is that
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some patients sometimes have symptomatic episodes where they can feel it,
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but many of them can be asymptomatic.
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And the fact that a patient isn't feeling like they've had any problems with their rhythm
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and then falsely thinks they can stop the blood thinners could be a real problem.
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So if you’ve been diagnosed as having a risk, you want to make sure you stay on those drugs,
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so that way if you have silent episodes of atrial fibrillation
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you don't put yourself at risk of having a stroke.
