Atrial fibrillation presents with different frequencies in patients affected by structural heart diseases requiring surgery, showing a peak incidence of up to 60-80% in mitral subjects. It causes an increased risk of systemic embolism, cardiac failure development and higher limitations due to dyspnoea and fatigue on exercise. Cox-Maze technique for surgical atrial fibrillation treatment was first used in 1987 and suffered lots of modifications since then. Nowadays, most centers have replaced the "cut and sew" technique by other methods using several power sources to achieve the same target in a much easier way. One of the alternative energy source currently used is radiofrequency ablation which has been demonstrated to be a simple, safe and reproducible procedure with an acceptable success rate in terms of sinus rhythm restoration. However, organized atrial activity (sinus rhythm on surface electrocardiogram) is not always accompanied by an effective mechanical atrial contraction, whose restoration represents one of the original Maze objective. Atrial contraction is effective when A waves are found in tricuspid and/or mitral transvalvular flow using Doppler echocardiography, allowing the patient to fully profit from hemodynamic and clinical advantages of an organized atrial contraction. Predictive factors of atrial contractility recovery and, more widely, of sinus rhythm achievement after modified Maze procedures have been investigated, but, at our knowledge, a parallel deep analysis and comparison of possible determinants of both surgical ablation goals is still lacking. In the present study, the investigators describe mid-term results of concomitant modified radiofrequency Maze in a large homogeneous population of mitral patients, focusing onto common predictors of sinus rhythm and atrial contractility restoring, their time course appearance and interrelation.
