Novel self-report tool for cardiovascular risk assessment

Abstract

Background-—The currently used atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk calculator relies on several measured variables and does not incorporate some well-established risk factors such as family history of premature myocardial infarction and other nontraditional risk factors. Our study aimed to develop and validate a simple risk score to predict 10-year risk of incident cardiovascular events using patient-reported information. Methods and Results-—Using data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities cohort, we identified adults with no previous history of cardiovascular disease and randomly divided the cohort into “development” (70%) and “validation” (30%) subgroups. Adjusted Cox regression modeling was used to develop a prediction model. The predictive performance of the new risk score was compared with the score derived from the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk calculator. A total of 9285 individuals met the inclusion criteria. During follow-up (median 8.93 years), a total of 694 (7.47%) incident cardiovascular events occurred. The following 6 factors were included: male sex, age, current smoking, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and family history of premature myocardial infarction. The C-statistic was 0.72 in the validation cohort with good calibration. The area under the curve for the simple risk score was comparable to the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk score. Conclusions-—The novel simple risk score is an easy-to-use tool to predict cardiovascular events in adults from self-reported information without need for laboratory or physical examination data. This risk score included 6-items and had comparable predictive performance to the guideline recommended atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk score but relies solely on self-reported information.