A total of 294 highly symptomatic antiarrhythmic therapy naïve
patients with paroxysmal AF were randomly allocated to an initial
strategy of RFA (n = 146) or AAD (n = 148) therapy. Eight patients
were excluded from the on-treatment analysis because they did not
receive the index treatment (Fig. 1).
RFA ablation was performed for 140 patients (96%) assigned to catheter ablation therapy. A total of 71 (51%) of them underwent one, 58
(41%) two, 8 (6%) three and 3 (2%) four ablation procedures, respectively.
Most of the repeat ablations were performed within 12 months from the
initial procedure and only 21% of the patients underwentfirst reablation
later than that. The mean number of ablations per patient was 1.6 ± 0.7.
Most common indication for reablation was AF (74 procedures). A total
of 110 patients (79%) received no supplementary AAD therapy.