Does Cha2ds2 Vasc really estimate risk of stroke due to Atrial fibrillation

 Does Cha2ds2 Vasc (CDVS) score really estimate the risk of a patient with atrial fibrillation (AF)? Or does it estimate the risk of a stroke in a person with vascular disease? I think the latter is the case.

The CDVS tallies up the number of vascular disease points and adds in age and gender and basically provides a risk of stroke based on a estimate of the amount of vascular disease the patient has. The presence of AF is not factored in to the CDVX score. The presence of AF merely provides an opportunity for the health care provider (HCP) to use that risk tool. The HCP give the patient the value from the CHVS algorithm which represent the risk associated with how much vascular disease that the questionnaire reveals . that risk expressed as percent risk of stroke per year . The actual risk of the AF patient would be believed to be increased by the extent to which it is believed that AF is itself a mechanistic cause of stroke, a  widely accepted view that has recently been challenged. S

So is it the assumption that the AF patient for whom a CDVS is obtained has at least that risk of stroke and the presence of AF surely must increase that risk by some factor so that anticoagulation is appropriate.