Loading...
Upper gastrointestinal (UGI) endoscopy plays a pivotal role in diagnosis and therapy of patients who present with acute UGI bleeding. Early endoscopy separates patients with high-risk lesions who will benefit from endoscopic therapy from those with low-risk lesions who can be treated safely without hospitalization. Some clinicians believe that the Blatchford risk score, which is based on clinical data alone, can predict which patients will have high-risk endoscopic stigmata and, thus, high risk for rebleeding. If so, a subgroup of low-risk patients could be identified for outpatient therapy without urgent endoscopy.
To evaluate the predictive value of a modified Blatchford score, investigators in Canada retrospectively evaluated data on 1869…