The Government’s stroke strategy missed a chance to prevent thousands of deaths every year, a leading cardiologist has said.

The strategy, launched last week, makes only brief references to heart rhythm disturbances. Professor Adam Fitzpatrick, medical director of the Arrhythmia Alliance, said he was baffled by the lack of any drive to detect and treat atrial fibrillation (AF), a condition suffered by half a million people. AF accounts for 96,000 acute hospital admissions a year and one in every three patients admitted with a stroke has AF. The risks of having a stroke can be cut by 60 per cent by giving them an anticoagulant drug such as warfarin. Yet only a fifth of AF patients who should be getting warfarin are prescribed it.

The Stroke Strategy says a hallmark of a quality stroke service is awareness and proper management of AF. But most of the strategy is focused on what happens after a stroke, such as providing stroke units. Professor Fitzpatrick, a cardiologist working in Manchester, said: “Prevention is better than cure and here the preventive strategy will cost buttons and avoid the high cost of acute stroke care.”

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