relationship between valvular heart diseases and atrial fib

In this video I discuss the relationship of valvular heart disease and atrial fibrillation. Ask a question at “AFib Fridays” on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/DoctorAFib/
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Transcript:
Thank you for visiting this video segment of Dr. AFib. I'm Dr. Morales. February is heart month. So I wanted to do some video features about how atrial fibrillation affects your heart as a whole. And not just talk only about atrial fibrillation. So In this video segment, we are going to talk about atrial fibrillation and valvular heart disease.
Now in your body, you have four main heart valves, two in the right, two on the left and the ones on the left more can affect having atrial fibrillation. First I will touch on aortic valve heart disease. The aortic valve is the last valve in your heart as blood is going out of your body to the heart to the rest of your body and is more directly connected to the left ventricle.
People when they have stenosis of the aortic valve, which is relatively common especially as people age or insufficiency, which is a leaky aortic valve. Aortic valve disease more indirectly causes atrial fibrillation. The way it works is that the aortic valve disease, first affects the left ventricle, which is the left lower chamber of the heart then can affect the atrium, which is the upper chambers of the heart. There's a little more indirect effect of how it can eventually cause atrial fibrillation.
However, what I mainly wanted to focus on was the mitral valve, the mitral valve is the one that is directly connected to the left atrium and has a more direct effect regarding causing atrial fibrillation.
Now many people have mild forms of mitral valve disease such as mild mitral valve insufficiency or mitral valve prolapse and those are unlikely to cause atrial fibrillation. However, as these diseases get more moderate or even severe, it can more directly cause atrial fibrillation. What happens is that they put a lot of direct pressure on the left atrium. The left atrium becomes more dilated, and stretch may develop more scar tissues, and that's what eventually leads to atrial fibrillation.