Background: Many studies have revealed apolipoproteins are risk factors for ischemic stroke, but the influence of apolipoproteins on onset age of first-ever atherosclerotic stroke has not been well investigated.
Methods: We recruited 357 qualified participants from consecutive patients with acute ischemic stroke who came to the stroke registry center in Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, Chengdu, China. Patients were stratified into tertiles according to the distributions of apoB levels for large artery atherosclerosis (LAA) and small artery atherosclerosis (SAA) groups. The onset age of stroke was analyzed tripartitely in terms of early-onset group, the middling-onset group and the late-onset group. Multinomial logistical regression was used to analyze the associations between the two.
Results: The risk of early-onset stroke increased monotonically with higher apoB levels (the second tertile, adjusted OR = 2.61, 95% CI 1.18-5.79 (p = 0.018); the third tertile, adjusted OR = 19.52, 95% CI 5.93-64.31 (p < 0.001)), and patients with the highest tertile of apoB levels had a 9.20 times (95% CI, 2.97-28.53, p < 0.001) increased risk of middling-onset stroke in reference to late onset of stroke.
Conclusions: The present study suggests the higher the apolipoprotein B levels are, the earlier an atherosclerotic stroke might occur in a Chinese population.
Keywords: apolipoprotein A1; apolipoprotein B; apolipoprotein B/A1 ratio; atherosclerotic; onset age; stroke.