Footnotes

• Contributors S-WL contributed to the conception of the article, initiated the draft of the article and approved the final draft submitted. Y-HK and K-FL conducted the data analysis.

• Funding This study was supported in part by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taiwan (MOHW108-TDU-B-212-133004) and China Medical University Hospital in Taiwan (DMR-107-192 and DMR-108-089), Academia Sinica Stroke Biosignature Project (BM10701010021), and MOST Clinical Trial Consortium for Stroke (MOST 108-2321-B-039-003). These funding agencies did not influence the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

• Competing interests None declared.

• Patient consent for publication Not required.

• Ethics approval Insurance reimbursement claims data used in this study were available for public access. Patient identification numbers had been scrambled to ensure confidentiality. Patient informed consent was not required. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of China Medical University and Hospital in Taiwan (CMUH-104-REC2-115).

• Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.