Preventive cardiologyRisk Prediction of Coronary Heart Disease Based on Retinal Vascular Caliber (from the Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities [ARIC] Study)
Section snippets
Methods
The Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities (ARIC) Study included a cohort of 15,792 women and men selected in 1987 through 1989 as probability samples of 45- to 64-year-old residents of 4 US communities: Forsyth County, North Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi (blacks only); suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Washington County, Maryland.3 Detailed protocols and differences between subjects and nonsubjects were described elsewhere.4 The present study was based on the 12,887 subjects (86% of
Results
Table 1 lists baseline characteristics of the study population. Mean follow-up was 8.8 years, 24% were followed up for ≥10 years, and during follow-up, 700 people experienced a CHD event. Three percent of people had retinopathy, 15% had retinal arteriolar focal narrowing, and 14% had arteriovenous nicking.
In the proportional hazards models (Table 2), both arteriolar and venular calibers were associated with incident CHD in women. Decreasing arteriolar and increasing venular calibers were
Discussion
This study showed that smaller retinal arteriolar and larger venular calibers were associated with increased 10-year risk of CHD in women without diabetes after adjusting for the traditional CHD risk factors included in the Framingham equation. No other retinal microvascular sign was related to the 10-year risk of CHD in men or women without diabetes. The increased risk associated with retinal caliber in women corresponded to a small increase in AUC (an increase of 1.7%), which suggested that
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the staff and participants of the ARIC Study for their important contributions.
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Cited by (0)
The ARIC Study is carried out as a collaborative study supported by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute contracts N01-HC-55015, N01-HC-55016, N01-HC-55018, N01-HC-55019, N01-HC-55020, N01-HC-55021, and N01-HC-55022.