Performance of the recommended ESC/EASD cardiovascular risk stratification model in comparison to SCORE and NT-proBNP as a single biomarker for risk prediction in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Background: Recently, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and European Association for the Society of Diabetes (EASD) introduced a new cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk stratification model to aid further treatment decisions in individuals with diabetes. Our study aimed to investigate the prognostic performance of the ESC/EASD risk model in comparison to the Systematic COronary Risk Evaluation (SCORE) risk model and NT-proBNP in an unselected cohort of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Methods: & Results. A total of 1690 T2DM patients with a 10-year follow up for fatal CVD and all-cause death and a 5-year follow up for CVD and all-cause hospitalizations were analyzed. According to ESC/EASD risk criteria 25 (1.5%) patients were classified as moderate, 252 (14.9%) high, 1125 (66.6%) very high risk and 288 (17.0%) were not classifiable. Both, NT-proBNP and SCORE risk model were associated with 10-year CVD and all-cause death and 5-year CVD and all-cause hospitalizations while the ESC/EASD model was only associated with 10-year all-cause death and 5-year all-cause hospitalizations. NT-proBNP and SCORE showed significantly higher C-indices than the ESC/EASD risk model for CVD death [0.80 vs 0.53, p<0.001; 0.64 vs 0.53, p=0.001] and all-cause death [0.73, 0.66 vs 0.52, p<0.001 for both].The performance of SCORE improved in a subgroup without CVD aged 40-64 years compared to the unselected cohort, while NT-proBNP performance was robust across all groups. Conclusion: The new introduced ESC/EASD risk stratification model performed limited compared to SCORE and single NT-proBNP assessment for predicting 10-year CVD and all-cause fatal events in individuals with T2DM.