You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 7, Issue 3
  • Atrial fibrillation had a negative impact on quality of life, and treatment with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator with atrial therapies helped patients regain a sense of normalcy

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Qualitative
Atrial fibrillation had a negative impact on quality of life, and treatment with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator with atrial therapies helped patients regain a sense of normalcy

https://doi.org/10.1136/ebn.7.3.93

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Deaton C, Dunbar SB, Moloney M, et al. Patient experiences with atrial fibrillation and treatment with implantable atrial defibrillation therapy. Heart Lung 2003;32:291–9.OpenUrlCrossRefPubMedWeb of Science

    Q What are patients’ experiences of living with symptomatic, drug refractory atrial fibrillation (AF) and treatment with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator with atrial therapies (ICD-AT)?

    DESIGN

    Descriptive qualitative approach.

    SETTING

    3 clinical centres in the USA.

    PATIENTS

    11 patients (mean age 63 y, age range 35–80 y, 73% men) who had AF that was unresponsive to treatment for 1–20 years. Patients had been living with an ICD-AT device for a period of 6 months to 2 years. Patients had no documented ventricular arrhythmia.

    METHODS

    Patients participated in semistructured interviews, which were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. 3 researchers coded the data according to key findings and themes using a qualitative interpretive approach. Codes were compared, and discrepancies were settled by a consensus process.

    MAIN FINDINGS

    Patients described a …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • For correspondence: Dr C Deaton, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. Mary.C.Deatonman.ac.uk

    • Source of funding: Medtronic Inc, Minneapolis, Minnesota.