3.1 Baseline characteristics of observed and simulated patients
Table 1 and Table S3 outline the baseline characteristics of observed and simulated patients in the four studies. The average age of these four studies were all above 70, with the highest mean age of 71.95 in ROCKET AF and the lowest mean age of 71.5 in XANTUS. The proportion of each comorbidity varied from different studies. A larger proportion of 54.9% rivaroxaban patients with prior stroke/TIA were included in ROCKET AF compared with the three observational studies. Meanwhile, the proportion of patients with heart failure (HF), hypertension, or diabetes mellitus (DM) was also higher in ROCKET AF. Therefore, the mean CHADS2 score was 3.48 ± 0.94 in ROCKET AF, which was much higher than that in the three observational studies, indicating the higher stroke risk of patients in ROCKET AF.