Development and Validation of a Novel Score for Predicting Long-Term Mortality after an Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background: Long-term mortality prediction can guide feasible discharge care plans and coordinate appropriate rehabilitation services. We aimed to develop and validate a prediction model to identify patients at risk of mortality after acute ischemic stroke (AIS). Methods: The primary outcome was all-cause mortality, and the secondary outcome was cardiovascular death. This study included 21,463 patients with AIS. Three risk prediction models were developed and evaluated: a penalized Cox model, a random survival forest model, and a DeepSurv model. A simplified risk scoring system, called the C-HAND (history of Cancer before admission, Heart rate, Age, eNIHSS, and Dyslipidemia) score, was created based on regression coefficients in the multivariate Cox model for both study outcomes. Results: All experimental models achieved a concordance index of 0.8, with no significant difference in predicting poststroke long-term mortality. The C-HAND score exhibited reasonable discriminative ability for both study outcomes, with concordance indices of 0.775 and 0.798. Conclusions: Reliable prediction models for long-term poststroke mortality were developed using information routinely available to clinicians during hospitalization.