Development and Validation of a Risk Prediction Model for Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease in Japanese Adults: The Hisayama Study

Aim: To develop and validate a new risk prediction model for predicting the 10-year risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) in Japanese adults. Methods: A total of 2,454 participants aged 40-84 years without a history of cardiovascular disease (CVD) were prospectively followed up for 24 years. An incident ASCVD event was defined as the first occurrence of coronary heart disease or atherothrombotic brain infarction. A Cox proportional hazards regression model was used to construct the prediction model. In addition, a simplified scoring system was translated from the developed prediction model. The model performance was evaluated using Harrell's C statistics, a calibration plot with the Greenwood-Nam-D'Agostino test, and a bootstrap validation procedure. Results: During a median of a 24-year follow-up, 270 participants experienced the first ASCVD event. The predictors of the ASCVD events in the multivariable Cox model included age, sex, systolic blood pressure, diabetes, serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, proteinuria, smoking habits, and regular exercise. The developed models exhibited good discrimination with negligible evidence of overfitting (Harrell's C statistics: 0.786 for the multivariable model and 0.789 for the simplified score) and good calibrations (the Greenwood-Nam-D'Agostino test: P=0.29 for the multivariable model, 0.52 for the simplified score). Conclusion: We constructed a risk prediction model for the development of ASCVD in Japanese adults. This prediction model exhibits great potential as a tool for predicting the risk of ASCVD in clinical practice by enabling the identification of specific risk factors for ASCVD in individual patients.

Automated summary

The aim of this study was to develop and validate a new risk prediction model for predicting the 10-year risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) in Japanese adults. A total of 2,454 participants without a history of cardiovascular disease were followed up for 24 years. The developed prediction model showed good discrimination and calibration, suggesting it has great potential as a clinical tool for predicting the risk of ASCVD in individual patients.