Pulmonary Vein Isolation Only for Atrial Fibrillation With Heart Failure (POLAR-HF)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Atrial fibrillation (AF) and heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) are both associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Ablation-based rhythm control, particularly using radiofrequency ablation with disparate strategies, has demonstrated clinical benefit. However, prospective data evaluating a pulmonary vein isolation (PVI)-only strategy in HFrEF are lacking, and no studies have directly compared ablation efficacy between patients with and without HFrEF. OBJECTIVES: This study sought to assess whether a PVI-only approach using cryoballoon ablation in patients with HFrEF (LVEF ≤40%) is noninferior to PVI-only in patients without HFrEF regarding rhythm control efficacy, and to describe safety outcomes. METHODS: We conducted a prospective, investigator-initiated, single-center, noninferiority, observational study with propensity score matching. The primary efficacy endpoint was the first documented recurrence of any atrial arrhythmia after a 90-day blanking period. Safety endpoints included death, cerebrovascular events, and procedure-related adverse events. RESULTS: A total of 1,420 patients (paroxysmal and persistent AF) underwent PVI. With propensity score matching, 1,044 patients were analyzed in a 1:5 ratio. Over a mean follow-up of 2 years, the primary efficacy endpoint occurred in 76 (43.7%) of 174 patients with HFrEF and in 379 (43.6%) of 870 without HFrEF (HR: 1.01; 95% CI: -∞ to 1.24; P = 0.005 for noninferiority). The incidence of all-cause mortality was numerically higher in patients with HFrEF (6.3% vs 3.4%; P = 0.07), while rates of procedure-related safety events were similar between groups (2.9% vs 4.1%; P = 0.53). CONCLUSIONS: In patients with AF undergoing ablation, a PVI-only approach shows noninferior rhythm control efficacy and comparable procedural safety in patients with HFrEF compared with those without HFrEF. (Cryoballoon Pulmonary Isolation for Atrial Fibrillation With Heart Failure [POLAR-HF]; NCT04461691).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".