Impact of atrial fibrillation in patients with lung cancer: Insights from National Inpatient Sample

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer mortality and thus remains a major medical concern [1].Atrial fibrillation (AF) is commonly associated with different cancers and contributes to overall morbidity.Few data are available regarding the incidence of AF in patients with lung cancer.The presence or absence of AF may be useful to predict prognosis of lung cancer patients and may affect the in-hospital morbidity as well as contributing to an increased length of stay (LOS) and cost [2].Hence, we conducted a retrospective study using the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database from 2016 to determine the impact of the presence of AF on patients with a diagnosis of lung cancer.We included all the patients with lung cancer both with and without AF by using the appropriate ICD-10 codes.Primary outcomes of interest were mortality, acute kidney injury, length of stay and cost of care.Multivariate logistic regression was used for adjustment of potential confounders including age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, alcohol use, chronic kidney disease, obesity, dyslipidemia, Charlson Comorbidity Index, hospital location, hospital region, teaching status, and hospital size.STATA/IC 15.1 was used for statistical analysis.We found a total of 159,615 patients with a diagnosis of lung cancer in 2016 after excluding missing values.Among them, 10,050 (6.29%) patients had a concurrent diagnosis of AF.Mean age of patients was 73 years (range 72.6-73.5) in lung cancer patients with AF, whereas