Background: Stroke is much more prevalent than coronary heart disease in China; thus, any risk prediction model only for coronary heart disease may not be appropriate in application. Our objective is to develop a cardiovascular risk prediction model appropriate for the Chinese population.
Methods and results: Cox proportional hazards regression was used to develop sex-specific optimal 10-year risk prediction models for ischemic cardiovascular disease (ICVD; including ischemic stroke and coronary events) from 17 years of follow-up data from the USA-PRC Collaborative Study of Cardiovascular Epidemiology cohort, in which 9903 participants were followed up every 2 years until 2000, and 371 ICVD events (266 strokes and 105 coronary heart disease events) occurred. The models showed ICVD was positively related to age, systolic blood pressure, serum total cholesterol, body mass index, current smoking status, and diabetes mellitus in both men and women. When the models were applied to the 17,329 participants in the China Multicenter Collaborative Study of Cardiovascular Epidemiology cohort, the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve were 0.796+/-0.036 for men and 0.791+/-0.036 for women. The simplified point score model resulted in similar c statistics. Comparison of the observed with the estimated incidence of ICVD at different risk levels showed satisfactory precision. Meanwhile, application of recalibrated Framingham models significantly overestimated the coronary heart disease risk in both men (by approximately 97%) and women (by approximately 228%).
Conclusions: The Cox regression prediction models and simplified point score model have satisfying predictive capability for estimating the 10-year integrated cardiovascular risk in Chinese, in whom stroke is the predominant cardiovascular disease.