Clinical risk model assessment for cardiovascular autonomic dysfunction in the general Chinese population

The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of cardiovascular autonomic (CA) dysfunction in the general Chinese population (instead of focusing on only patients with diabetes) and to develop a clinical risk model for the disease.

We evaluated CA dysfunction prevalence in a dataset based on a population sample consisting of 2,092 individuals. Clinical risk models were derived from exploratory sets using multiple logistic regression analysis. The performance of the clinical risk models was tested in the validation sets.

CA dysfunction prevalence was 18.50% in the general Chinese population, while the prevalence was 24.14% in individuals aged ≥60 years. Its prevalence was 31.17, 24.69, and 21.26% in patients with diabetes, and hypertensive, and metabolic syndrome populations, respectively. Finally, we developed clinical risk models involving seven risk factors. The mean area under the receiver-operating curve was 0.758 (95% CI 0.724-0.793) for these models. The mean sensitivity and specificity of the clinical risk models was 75.0 and 66.2%, respectively.

CA dysfunction prevalence was high in the general Chinese population, and its prevalence was more frequent in individuals with diabetes, and hypertensive, and metabolic syndrome. Clinical risk models with a high value for predicting CA dysfunction were developed. CA dysfunction has become a major public health problem in China that requires strategies aimed at the prevention and treatment of the disease.