Does the HAS-BLED score improve major bleeding risk prediction compared to HEMORR2 HAGES, ATRIA, CHADS2, or CHA2 DS2-VASc scores in anticoagulated patients with atrial fibrillation?
The HAS-BLED score demonstrates superior diagnostic accuracy for predicting major bleeding risk in anticoagulated patients with atrial fibrillation compared to other common risk scores.
Our objective was to compare the diagnostic accuracy between the HAS-BLED score and any of HEMORR2 HAGES, ATRIA, CHADS2 , or CHA2 DS2 -VASc scores in anticoagulated patients with atrial fibrillation. We systematically searched the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, PubMed, and Embase databases for relevant studies. Data were extracted and analyzed according to predefined clinical endpoints. Eleven studies were identified. Discrimination analysis demonstrates that HAS-BLED has no significant C-statistic differences for bleeding risk prediction compared with ATRIA or HEMORR2 HAGES, but it has significant differences compared with CHADS2 or CHA2 DS2 -VASc. The significant positive net reclassification improvement and integrated discrimination improvement values also show that HAS-BLED is superior to that of any of HEMORR2 HAGES, ATRIA, CHADS2 , or CHA2 DS2 -VASc scores. According to calibration analysis of HAS-BLED, it overpredicts the risk of bleeding in the low (risk ratio RR: 1.16, 95% confidence interval CI: 0.63-2.13, P = 0.64) risk stratification but underpredicts that in the moderate (RR: 0.66, 95% CI: 0.51-0.86, P = 0.002) and high (RR: 0.88, 95% CI: 0.70-1.10, P = 0.27) risk stratifications. The HAS-BLED score not only performs better than the HEMORR2 HAGES and ATRIA bleeding scores, but it also is superior to the CHADS2 and CHA2 DS2 -VASc stroke scores for bleeding prediction. The HAS-BLED score should be the optimal choice to assess major bleeding risk in clinical practice.
Zhu et al. (2015) studied this question.