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Research Paper|Volume 11, Issue 15|pp 5807—5816

Association between healthy vascular aging and the risk of the first stroke in a community-based Chinese cohort

Yingying Yang1,2, Anxin Wang1,2, Xiaodong Yuan3, Quanhui Zhao4,5, Xiaoxue Liu6, Shuohua Chen5, Xiuyan Wang7, Yongjun Wang1,2, Shouling Wu5, Yilong Wang1,2
  • 1Department of Neurology, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
  • 2Advanced Innovation Center for Human Brain Protection, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China
  • 3Department of Neurology, Kailuan General Hospital, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
  • 4Graduate School, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
  • 5Department of Cardiology, Kailuan General Hospital, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
  • 6Department of Cardiology, Tangshan People’s Hospital, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
  • 7Department of Geriatric Disease, Kailuan General Hospital, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
* Equal contribution
Received: May 21, 2019Accepted: August 5, 2019Published: August 15, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102170

Copyright © 2019 Yang et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

In this study we tested whether vascular aging is associated with the risk of first stroke in the Kailuan cohort, 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). 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). 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.