Identification of hypertension predictors and application to hypertension prediction in an urban Han Chinese population: A longitudinal study, 2005-2010

Introduction: Research suggests that targeting high-risk, nonhypertensive patients for preventive intervention may delay the onset of hypertension. We aimed to develop a biomarker-based risk prediction model for assessing hypertension risk in an urban Han Chinese population. Methods: We analyzed data from 26,496 people with hypertension to extract factors from 11 check-up biomarkers. Then, depending on a 5-year follow-up cohort, a Cox model for predicting hypertension development was built by using extracted factors as predictors. Finally, we created a hypertension synthetic predictor (HSP) by weighting each factor with its risk for hypertension to develop a risk assessment matrix. Results: After factor analysis, 5 risk factors were extracted from data for both men and women. After a 5-year follow-up, the cohort of participants had an area under receiver operating characteristic curve (area under the curve [AUC]) with an odds ratio (OR) of 0.755 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.746-0.763) for men and an OR of 0.801 (95% CI, 0.792-0.810) for women. After tenfold cross validation, the AUC was still high, with 0.755 (95% CI, 0.746-0.763) for men and 0.800 (95% CI, 0.791-0.810) for women. An HSP-based 5-year risk matrix provided a convenient tool for risk appraisal. Conclusion: Hypertension could be explained by 5 factors in a population sample of Chinese urban Han. The HSP may be useful in predicting hypertension.