Prediction of Incident Heart Failure in General Practice: The ARIC Study

Background —A simple and effective Heart Failure (HF) risk score would facilitate the primary prevention and early diagnosis of HF in general practice. We examined the external validity of existing HF risk scores, optimized a 10-year HF risk function, and examined the incremental value of several biomarkers, including NT-proBNP. Methods and Results —During 15.5 years (210,102 person-years of follow-up), 1487 HF events were recorded among 13,555 members of the bi-ethnic Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study cohort. The area under curve (AUC) from the Framingham-published, Framingham-recalibrated, Health ABC HF recalibrated, and ARIC risk scores were 0.610, 0.762, 0.783, and 0.797, respectively. Upon addition of NT-pro-BNP, the optimism corrected AUC of the ARIC HF risk score increased from 0.773 (95% CI: 0.753-0.787) to 0.805 (95% CI: 0.792-0.820). Inclusion of NT-proBNP improved the overall classification of re-calibrated Framingham, re-calibrated Health ABC, and ARIC risk scores by 18%, 12%, and 13%, respectively. In contrast, Cystatin C or hs-CRP did not add towards incremental risk prediction. Conclusions —The ARIC HF risk score is more parsimonious yet performs slightly better than the extant risk scores in predicting 10-year risk of incident HF. The inclusion of NT-proBNP markedly improves HF risk prediction. A simplified risk score restricted to a patient's age, race, gender, and NT-proBNP performs comparably to the full score (AUC = 0.745), and is suitable for automated reporting from laboratory panels and electronic medical records.