STARLING study: Scotland-wide Treatment & Outcomes in Atrial Fibrillation: Real-world data LINkaGe study
Project reference: RAS-24-64
Approval date: 2 April 2025
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Lead organisation |
Principal Investigator |
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| University of Aberdeen | Dana Dawson |
Lay summary
In this study, we will undertake a Scotland-wide data linkage including patients with a hospital diagnosis of AF in Scotland between 1999 and 2023 to evaluate their treatment and outcomes over a follow-up period between 2015 and 2023.
Firstly, we aim to understand whether and to what extent there are sex differences in AF treatment and outcomes (death, stroke, hospital admission for major bleeding) in contemporary clinical practice in Scotland, as well as their determining factors. These results will be important in informing future Scotland-wide health service planning in ensuring health equity. Furthermore, we also aim to describe the major patient subgroups and their defining characteristics such age, frailty and other health conditions, and understand how outcomes differ between these groups.
These results will inform future clinical trials of the most relevant AF patient subgroups in which further evaluation of therapies is warranted in order to extend the current evidence base.
Public benefit statement
The results of this study will provide relevant insights into sex disparities in the management of AF in current practice in Scotland and inform future health service planning in ensuring health equity.
Furthermore, these results will also provide the rationale for developing an AF registry in Scotland aiming to not only ascertain these important aspects of AF epidemiology prospectively, but also provide a participant base for recruitment in future randomised controlled trials evaluating interventions in specific patient subgroups.
The results of this study will also provide direct information on the AF patient subgroups and interventions which require randomised clinical trial testing. This will lead to the development of evidence-based personalised treatment strategies for AF, with the overall aim of ultimately improving the quality of life and survival for millions of people suffering from this increasingly common condition. These results will be used by our research group and collaborators to elaborate new research study proposal, with separate ethical and funding support, to undertake future registries and clinical trials.
We will not seek to identify any people whose pseudonymised data will be released by PHS to the researchers through this application. We will feed back our results to the Ageing Clinical and Experimental Research patient and public involvement (PPI) group, as well as disseminate our results at public engagement events and press releases. With regards to relevant clinical groups, we will first and foremost aim to publish our results into high-impact peer-reviewed journals with a wide international audience, such as the European Heart Journal, Circulation, etc.
Furthermore, we will present the findings of our study at international clinical conferences such as the European Society of Cardiology Congress.
Datasets used