Estimating Bleeding Risk with Anticoagulation in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation

“HAS-BLED” is a recently developed and validated scoring system to assess bleeding risk in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) who are receiving anticoagulant therapy. It assigns 1 point to each of the following nine risk factors: hypertension, abnormal renal function, abnormal liver function, previous stroke, bleeding history or predisposition, history of labile international normalized ratio (INR), age ≥65, concomitant aspirin or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug therapy, and substantial alcohol intake. In this study from Spain, researchers compared the predictive value of HAS-BLED with that of another recently published scoring system (“ATRIA”; JW Gen Med Sep 29 2011) in 937 anticoagulated AF patients. The average duration of observ…