Association between Healthy Vascular Aging and Risk of First Stroke in a Community-Based Chinese Cohort
2019-08-15
More than 76% of strokes are first events6. Therefore, primary prevention of stroke is of great significance. The guidelines for the primary prevention of stroke emphasize the importance of controlling risk factors . Targets for stroke prevention have been reordered to align with the American Heart Association (AHA)’s public health campaign for ideal cardiovascular health, which is closely associated with the status of vascular aging. Thus, we speculated that heathy vascular aging (HVA) might be related to reduced risk of first stroke. The aim of our study is to investigate the association between HVA and the risk of first stroke in community-based Chinese cohort. To examine whether the status of vascular aging is associated with the risk of first stroke in a community-based Chinese cohort.
For participants aged ≥ 50 years, healthy vascular aging (HVA) was defined as an absence of hypertension and a brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity < the mean + 2 standard deviations, which was determined from a reference sample of healthy participants aged < 30 years. The primary outcome was first stroke (ischemic or hemorrhagic).
It thus appears that HVA reduced the risk of first stroke in a community-based Chinese population. This suggests that evaluation of vascular aging as part of public health screening may be useful for stroke risk assessment.
In total, 11,474 participants were enrolled. The prevalence of HVA decreased from 36.0% in participants aged 50-59 years to 4.7% in those aged ≥ 70 years. During a median follow-up of 3.3 years, the incidence of first stroke was 0.5% in the HVA group but was 2.6% in the Non-HVA group. After adjusting for confounding variables, HVA was associated with a 0.32-fold lower risk of first stroke compared to the Non-HVA group (95% confidence interval, 0.18-0.56; p < 0.001).