Predicting Bleeding Events in Anticoagulated Patients With Atrial Fibrillation: A Comparison Between the HAS-BLED and GARFIELD-AF Bleeding Scores

Background-Patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) treatedwith oral anticoagulantsmay be exposed to an increased risk of bleeding events. The HAS-BLED(Hypertension, Abnormal renal and liver function, Stroke, Bleeding, Labile INRs, Elderly, Drugs or alcohol) score is a simple, well-established, clinical bleeding-risk prediction score. Recently, a new algorithm-based score was proposed, the GARFIELD-AF (Global Anticoagulant in the Field-AF) bleeding score. We compared HAS-BLED and GARFIELD-AF scores in predicting adjudicated bleeding events in a clinical trial cohort of patients with AF taking anticoagulants, in the first external comparative validation of both scores. Methods and Results-We analyzed patients from the SPORTIF (Stroke Prevention Using an Oral Thrombin Inhibitor in Patients With AF) III and V trials. All patients assigned to the warfarin arm with information to calculate the scores were considered. Outcomes were major, major/clinically relevant nonmajor, and any bleeding. A total of 3550 warfarin-treated patients were available for analysis. Of these patients, 2519 (71.0%) had a HAS-BLED score >= 3, whereas based on GARFIELD-AF median value, 2056 (57.9%) were categorized as "high score." Both HAS-BLED and GARFIELD-AF C-indexes showed modest predictive value (C-index [95% confidence interval] for major bleeding, 0.58 [0.56-0.60] and 0.56 [0.54-0.57], respectively); however, GARFIELD-AF was not predictive of any bleeding. The GARFIELD-AF bleeding score had a significantly lower sensitivity and a negative reclassification for any bleeding compared with HAS-BLED, assessed by integrated discrimination improvement and net reclassification improvement (both P<0.001). HAS-BLED showed a 5% net benefit for any bleeding occurrence. Conclusions-The algorithm-based GARFIELD-AF bleeding score did not show any significant improvement in major and major/clinically relevant nonmajor prediction compared with the simple HAS-BLED score. For clinical usefulness in prediction of any bleeding, the HAS-BLED score showed a significant net benefit compared with the GARFIELD-AF.