The Heart Surgery Forum® is pleased to announce the debut of a new special content section of the HSF web site dedicated to Microwave Ablation.

According to a report by R.H. Falk in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, in the United States alone there are currently two million or more patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). It is projected that, because of increasing life expectancy, up to one-third of the adult general population in the U.S. will eventually be affected by atrial fibrillation. The numbers are similar for the rest of the world.

Until recently the treatment of AF consisted primarily of palliation, mostly in the form of pharmacological intervention or device-based treatment such as atrial management devices, atrioventricular (AV) node ablation and permanent ventricular pacing, among others. However, because of recent advances in non-pharmacologic therapies, the current expectation of patients and referring physicians is that AF will be cured, rather than palliated, in our lifetime.

This special content section is dedicated to the discussion of Microwave Ablation, one of the surgical options available for the treatment of AF. The section will be Co-edited by Mark M. Levinson, MD, Hutchinson, Kansas, as Editor-in-Chief of The Heart Surgery Forum, and Dr. Adam E. Saltman, of the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, who will serve as Section Editor.

Additional resource: Microwave ablation animations

Return to the Microwave Ablation index