Smith, Jeff

Background: Sepsis survivors experience substantial long-term cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality. The pooled-cohort atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) score estimates 10-year risk in the general population, but its accuracy soon after sepsis is unknown. Objectives: (1) Describe the absolute five-year incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) after sepsis hospitalization. (2) Evaluate the discrimination and calibration of the 10-year ASCVD score for predicting five-year MACE in this setting. Research Questions: The ASCVD score would underpredict five-year MACE in sepsis survivors, reflecting their heightened risk. Methods: We performed a retrospective closed-cohort study using electronic health records from Mayo Clinic hospitals (USA). Adults aged 40–75 years hospitalized for sepsis between 2018 and 2020 were eligible if follow-up was ≥5 years; the age criterion matched the derivation range of the ASCVD score. The primary outcome was five-year MACE—myocardial infarction (MI), ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke, or CV death. Secondly we evaluated the predictive performance of ASCVD score for five-year MACE. Discrimination was assessed with the area under the receiver-operating curve (AUROC); calibration with Calibration-in-the-Large (CITL, ideal = 0) and slope (ideal = 1). Performance metrics were calculated in patients with complete ASCVD variables. Results: A total of 6306 sepsis admissions were screened. 2424 patients were excluded for age outside 40–75 years and 879 for <5 year follow-up, leaving 2718 patients for incidence analyses. Median age was 65 years (IQR 56–70); 55 % were male, 38 % required ICU care, and 91 % were White. Median body-mass index was 28.2 kg/m2 (IQR 23.7-34.7). During follow-up, 125 patients (4.6 %) had MI, 219 (8.1 %) experienced stroke, and 303 (11.1 %) died of CV causes; overall, 1573 patients (57.9 %) met the composite MACE outcome. Complete ASCVD data were available for 409 patients. In this subset, discrimination was moderate (AUROC 0.65; 95 % CI 0.59–0.71). Calibration showed CITL +0.34 (95 % CI 0.09–0.59) and slope 0.50 (95 % CI 0.28–0.72), indicating systematic infra-prediction and over-fitting, respectively. Conclusion: Five-year MACE incidence after sepsis is high. The 10-year ASCVD score moderately discriminates but underestimates five-year CV risk in this population, highlighting the need for sepsis-specific predictive models or recalibration to guide targeted post-sepsis cardiovascular prevention.