• Miguel Marques Antunes, Mariana Alves, Fausto J Pinto, Giancarlo Agnelli, and Daniel Caldeira.
• Cardiovascular Center of the University of Lisbon (CCUL), Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Prof. Egas Moniz, Lisbon 1649-028, Portugal; Centro Hospitalar Universitário Lisboa Central, Alameda Santo António dos Capuchos, 1169-050, Lisbon, Portugal.
• Eur. J. Intern. Med. 2021 Dec 1; 94: 45-55.

BackgroundIn patients with venous thromboembolism (VTE), bleeding risk should be carefully assessed but none of the available risk scores is currently recommended. The aim of this study was to systematically evaluate the performance of bleeding scores in patients with VTE focusing on high-risk patients.MethodsLongitudinal studies were searched in Medline and Cochrane Library, as well as reviews and references of retrieved articles. Studies were identified, data were extracted, and reporting quality was evaluated. We determined the sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (LR+), and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) of the 'high risk' category of each bleeding score. Random effects meta-analysis was performed in order to derive the central estimates and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI).ResultsTwenty-one studies and ten bleeding scores fulfilled the inclusion criteria. VTE-BLEED showed the highest sensitivity but the second-lowest specificity (Se 76%; Sp 61%), followed by ACCP (Se 59%; Sp 57%). The remaining scores had high specificity (> 80%) but a low sensitivity (< 20%). HEMORR2HAGES and Niewenhuis score showed the best performance regarding LR+ that was 2.67 and 5.91, respectively. Regarding DOR, the Niewenhuis score and VTE-BLEED were the best performers with 9.04; 95% CI 3.87-21.09 and 4.94 95% CI 2.66-9.09, respectively. In a cohort with patients predominantly treated with direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), VTE-BLEED had the highest sensitivity (Se 77%; Sp 60%).ConclusionsOverall, the majority of the risk scores showed a moderate ability to forecast major bleeding events, with the VTE-BLEED as the most sensitive in patients treated with DOACs.Copyright © 2021 European Federation of Internal Medicine. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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