It's a scoring system that identifies risk for stroke for people with afib WITHOUT ANTICOAGULATION. If you look at them, they are normal risk factors anyway. They use the scoring for determining whether to give a person nothing, aspirin, or anticoagulants. It is that simple. There are 3 versions of CHADS scores: CHADS, CHADS2 and CHA2DS2VaSC. They kind of refined it over the years and added more risk factors. I'll focus on CHADS2. Each factor counts as 1 except age over 75 and prior TIA or stroke. They are worth 2. If you score 2, you probably will be on anticoagulants like warfarin or pradaxa. The "CHADS" thing comes in because the risk factors first letters spell CHADS. Obviously, in CHA2DS2VaSC there are more points, so each point is weighted less.

CHADS2:
C Congestive heart failure 1
H Hypertension: blood pressure consistently above 140/90 mmHg (or treated hypertension on medication) 1
A Age 75 years 1
D Diabetes mellitus 1
S2 Prior Stroke or TIA 2

Annual Stroke Risk[2] CHADS2 Score Stroke Risk (for CHADS2)

% Range
0 1.9 1.23.0
1 2.8 2.03.8
2 4.0 3.15.1
3 5.9 4.67.3
4 8.5 6.311.1
5 12.5 8.217.5
6 18.2 10.527.4

CHA2DS2VaSC

Condition Points
C Congestive heart failure (or Left ventricular systolic dysfunction) 1
H Hypertension: blood pressure consistently above 140/90 mmHg (or treated hypertension on medication) 1
A2 Age 75 years 2
D Diabetes Mellitus 1
S2 Prior Stroke or TIA or thromboembolism 2
V Vascular disease (eg. peripheral artery disease, myocardial infarction, aortic plaque) 1
A Age 65-74 years 1
Sc Sex category (i.e. female gender) 1


Anyway, warfarin is supposed to lower your risk by 70%, depending how much time you stay in the proper range of blood thinning. pradaxa claims they are 35% more effective than warfarin (I don't want to get into a debate on the numbers with anyone on that), so I multiplied the numbers and it comes out to a 94.5% risk in stroke. The point is, if you have a CHADS2 score of 2, look at the risk factor and reduce it by the blood thinner you are taking. Anyway, the truth of the matter is, you could have a risk of 2 and never have a stroke anyway.

Actually, age over 75 scores 2 ONLY for CHA2DS2VaSC... so my mistake. If you are over 75, it only represents 2 out of 10 points for CHA2DS2VaSC and 1 out of 6 points for CHADS2. So it doesn't really change much. Hope I didn't confuse you.

Bottom line: take your medicine and your risk goes down to normal or almost.

Thanks so much for the info Petey. I knew I could count on your wisdom and research. I am currently on Pradaxa and I am 53 years old. So I guess my CHADS is low.

Lookin good PeDee!

My Chad is 2, a point for age, and a point for being female. I asked my Dr. why the extra point for being female, and he said that is the "calculation"...So I take Pradaxa