Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of death in Japan. The present study aimed to develop new risk prediction models for long-term risks of all-cause and cardiovascular death in patients with chronic phase CVD.

Methods: Among the subjects registered in the BioBank Japan database, 15,058 patients aged ≥40 years with chronic ischemic CVD (ischemic stroke or myocardial infarction) were divided randomly into a derivation cohort (n = 10,039) and validation cohort (n = 5019). These subjects were followed up for 8.55 years in median. Risk prediction models for all-cause and cardiovascular death were developed using the derivation cohort by Cox proportional hazards regression. Their prediction performances for 5-year risk of mortality were evaluated in the validation cohort.

Results: During the follow-up, all-cause and cardiovascular death events were observed in 2962 and 962 patients from the derivation cohort and 1536 and 481 from the validation cohort, respectively. Risk prediction models for all-cause and cardiovascular death were developed from the derivation cohort using ten traditional cardiovascular risk factors, namely, age, sex, CVD subtype, hypertension, diabetes, total cholesterol, body mass index, current smoking, current drinking, and physical activity. These models demonstrated modest discrimination (c-statistics, 0.703 for all-cause death; 0.685 for cardiovascular death) and good calibration (Hosmer-Lemeshow χ²-test, P = 0.17 and 0.15, respectively) in the validation cohort.

Conclusions: We developed and validated risk prediction models of all-cause and cardiovascular death for patients with chronic ischemic CVD. These models would be useful for estimating the long-term risk of mortality in chronic phase CVD.