Thanks for your comments;
Of course you are right that the comments so far are not rigorous enough to inform science. This was not the point and the goal of the forum string was to test the waters.
As you have seen from your literature review is that over 3.5 hours of vigorous exercise per week (20 met-h/wk) increases your risk. But the curve over this met-h/week had quite a slow slope.
Isn’t it peculiar that this isn’t the same for women?
Don’t you think that it is more than only met-h/week? shouldn’t current age, time of life when training occurred, type of training (long and slow vs high intensity), left atrial size, family history, breaks during training post-season, PACs on Holter etc etc impact the risk of atrial fibrillation.
Part of the problem with previous research is that it has been heterogeneous in terms of training or included participants or have been randomized for a few weeks or have included too few participants. Happy to speak about the specifics of these studies further.
To really do this right we would all include our baseline demographics, age, sex, family history, training so far, medical history (hypertension, diabetes, LVH, stroke, heart failure, alcohol use, etc). We would all have standardized, core-lab adjudicated testing with an echocardiogram (including atrial strain) and ecg on a yearly basis.
Then we would train. The part of trainer road that is so good is that all of us would have only so many plans. The other difference in current training that is different than previous research is that we often use power and train as a percentage of our FTP.
It would take a few thousand people to do this well (as you have alluded to).
As I am sure you have seen from my research on pubmed that it has primarily been in atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias.
I do appreciate your interest on this subject.
Thanks for your comments
Matt