Comparison of CHADS-VASc and AHEAD scores for the prediction of incident dementia in patients hospitalized for heart failure: a nationwide cohort study.

This study explores the use of the CHADS-VASc and the AHEAD scores to predict incident dementia in patients with heart failure (HF) who need hospitalization. We used a large national database to study 387,595 adult patients hospitalized for HF from Taiwan. This registration cohort was followed to document the cumulative incidence of dementia. The area under the curve of receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) was used to evaluate the discriminative ability of CHADS-VASc and AHEAD scores in predicting dementia, whereas the DeLong test was used to examine the difference between the predictive capacity. A higher CHADS-VASc and AHEAD scores appear to be more strongly associated with a higher incidence of dementia. The AUROC for CHADS-VASc score in predicting dementia (0.61, 95% CI = 0.60-0.61) is significantly higher than the AHEAD score (0.55, 95% CI = 0.54-0.55) (DeLong test p < 0.001). A significantly higher ability, by AUROC, of CHADS-VASc score to predict new-onset dementia in patients hospitalized for HF is found.