Predicting 10-Year and Lifetime Stroke Risk in Chinese Population

Background and Purpose— Risk assessment is essential for the primary prevention of stroke. However, the current available tools derived from Chinese populations are insufficient for individualized 10-year and lifetime stroke risk prediction. Our study aims to develop and validate personalized 10-year and lifetime stroke risk equations incorporating 4 large Chinese cohorts. Methods— We used 2 prospective cohorts of 21 320 participants with similar survey protocols as the derivation cohort to develop sex-specific 10-year and lifetime stroke risk equations. Two other independent cohorts with 14 123 and 70 838 participants were used for external validation. In addition, the performance of the 10-year stroke risk equations among participants aged ≥55 years was compared with the new Framingham Stroke Risk Profile. Results— The sex-specific equations for predicting 10-year stroke risk had C statistics being 0.810 for men and 0.810 for women, with calibration χ 2 being 15.0 ( P =0.092) and 7.8 ( P =0.550), respectively. The lifetime stroke risk equations also showed C statistics around 0.800 and calibration χ 2 below 20 for both sexes. In the validation cohorts, we found good agreement between the observed and predicted stroke probabilities for both the 10-year and lifetime stroke risk equations. Further compared with the new Framingham Stroke Risk Profile, our 10-year stroke risk equations displayed better prediction capability. In addition, based on lifetime stroke risk assessment, 5.7% of study participants aged 35 to 49 years old were further reclassified as high risk, who were initially categorized as low 10-year risk. Conclusions— We developed a well-performed tool for predicting personalized 10-year and lifetime stroke risk among the Chinese adults, which will facilitate the further identification of high-risk individuals and community-based stroke prevention in China.