BACKGROUND: Stroke Prognostication using Age and NIH (National Institutes of 
Health) Stroke Scale (SPAN)-100 is a simple and easy-to-use tool for assessing 
the outcomes of ischemic stroke after thrombolysis. To explore its application, 
we evaluated SPAN-100's prognostic value in predicting 3- and 12-month outcomes 
in general ischemic stroke patients.
METHODS: We applied the SPAN-100 to ischemic stroke patients from the China 
National Stroke Registry. Poor outcome was defined as a modified Rankin Scale of 
2-6. Discrimination of SPAN-100 was assessed by the area under the 
receiver-operator curves (AUC) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). We also 
performed an exploratory post hoc analysis of the performance of the SPAN index 
score using 80 as the cutoff point.
RESULTS: Among 11,894 ischemic stroke patients, 479 (4.0%) patients were 
SPAN-100 positive. The AUC of SPAN-100 for poor outcome was .54 (95% CI, 
.54-.54) at 3 months and .54 (95% CI, .54-.55) at 12 months, respectively. In 
the exploratory analysis, when 80 was used as the cutoff point of SPAN index 
score, the AUC for poor outcome was .66 (95% CI, .66-.67) at 3 months and .68 
(95% CI, .67-.68) at 12 months, respectively.
CONCLUSIONS: SPAN-100 suffered from low prediction power for 3- and 12-month 
outcomes of ischemic stroke in Chinese population. A cutoff point of 80 may 
improve the performance, but none of them had an AUC above the threshold of .8 
required for use in individuals.