Higuchi S, et al. - Since atrial fibrillation (AF) in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is greatly correlated with worsening of their clinical condition, researchers retrospectively studied the long-term clinical course following catheter ablation (CA) in these patients. They examined two groups of primary HCM patients who received rhythm control therapy for AF: those who had CA (n = 34) and those without CA (n = 60). A mean follow-up of 5.8 years was performed, during which progression of the AF type into permanent AF was seen in 6% in the CA group and 28% in the non-CA group. In addition, the CA group vs non-CA group exhibited a significantly lower incidence of clinical events in the Kaplan-Meyer curve analyses. The incidence of clinical events was independently predicted only by CA therapy in a Cox multivariate analysis. In HCM patients with AF, CA may be related to a encouraging long-term clinical course.