PHILADELPHIA – A prognostic score for acute ischemic stroke that incorporates copeptin levels, age, recanalization, and National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score has been externally validated and accurately predicts unfavorable outcome, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
Although the four-item score could not be validated for mortality prediction, it had reasonable accuracy for predicting unfavorable functional outcome, defined as disability or mortality 3 months after ischemic stroke, Gian Marco De Marchis, MD, of the department of neurology and the stroke center at University Hospital Basel (Switzerland), said in a presentation.
“The use of a biomarker increases prognostic accuracy, allowing us to personalize prognosis in the frame of individualized, precision medicine,” Dr. De Marchis said.
Copeptin has been linked to disability and mortality at 3 months in two independent, large cohort studies of patients with ischemic stroke, he said.
The four-item prognostic score devised by Dr. De Marchis and his coinvestigators, which they call the CoRisk score, was developed based on a derivation cohort of 319 acute ischemic stroke patients and a validation cohort including another 783 patients in the Copeptin for Risk Stratification in Acute Stroke Patients (CoRisk) Study.
Diagnostic accuracy was 82% for the endpoint of unfavorable functional outcome at 3 months, according to Dr. De Marchis.
“The observed outcomes matched well with the expected outcomes,” he said in his presentation.
Further analyses demonstrated that the addition of copeptin indeed contributed to the diagnostic accuracy of the score, improving the classification for 46%; in other words, about half of the patients were reclassified based on addition of the biomarker data.
By contrast, the score is not well suited to predict mortality alone at 3 months, the results of the analyses showed.
The algorithm used to calculate the score based on its four variables is somewhat complex, but available as a free app and online calculator, Dr. De Marchis said.
Dr. De Marchis and his coauthors had nothing to disclose related to their study. A full report on the study was published ahead of print on March 1 in Neurology.
SOURCE: De Marchis GM et al. AAN 2019, Abstract S47.001.