Novel Self-Report Tool for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Area of Science:

• Cardiology
• Epidemiology
• Preventive Medicine

Background:

• Current atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk calculators lack key patient-reported factors like family history.
• There is a need for accessible tools to predict incident cardiovascular events.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a simple, patient-reported risk score for 10-year cardiovascular event risk.
• To compare the novel score's performance against the established ASCVD risk calculator.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities cohort, randomly splitting it into development (70%) and validation (30%) subgroups.
• Employed adjusted Cox regression modeling to identify significant risk factors for cardiovascular events.
• Included 6 self-reported factors: male sex, age, current smoking, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and family history of premature myocardial infarction.

Main Results:

• The study included 9285 individuals with a median follow-up of 8.93 years, during which 694 (7.47%) incident cardiovascular events occurred.
• The developed risk score demonstrated a C-statistic of 0.72 in the validation cohort with good calibration.
• The novel risk score's predictive performance was comparable to the standard ASCVD risk calculator.

Conclusions:

• A novel, 6-item risk score effectively predicts 10-year cardiovascular events using solely self-reported information.
• This easy-to-use tool eliminates the need for laboratory or physical examination data.
• The score offers comparable predictive accuracy to guideline-recommended ASCVD risk scores.