We sought to assess the performance of existing
bleeding risk scores, such as the
Hypertension, Abnormal Renal/Liver Function,
Stroke,
Bleeding History or Predisposition, Labile INR, Elderly, Drugs/Alcohol Concomitantly (HAS-BLED) score or the Outpatient
Bleeding Risk Index (OBRI), in patients with
heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) in sinus rhythm (SR) treated with
warfarin or
aspirin. We calculated HAS-BLED and OBRI risk scores for 2,305 patients with HFrEF in SR enrolled in the
Warfarin versus
Aspirin in Reduced Cardiac Ejection Fraction trial. Proportional hazards models were used to test whether each score predicted major
bleeding, and comparison of different risk scores was performed using Harell C-statistic and net reclassification improvement index. For the
warfarin arm, both scores predicted
bleeding risk, with OBRI having significantly greater C-statistic (0.72 vs 0.61; p = 0.03) compared to HAS-BLED, although the net reclassification improvement for comparing OBRI to HAS-BLED was not significant (0.32, 95% confidence interval [CI] -0.18 to 0.37). Performance of the OBRI and HAS-BLED risk scores was similar for the
aspirin arm. For participants with OBRI scores of 0 to 1,
warfarin compared with
aspirin reduced
ischemic stroke (hazard ratio [HR] 0.51, 95% CI 0.26 to 0.98, p = 0.042) without significantly increasing major
bleeding (HR 1.24, 95% CI 0.66 to 2.30, p = 0.51). For those with OBRI score of ≥2, there was a trend for reduced
ischemic stroke with
warfarin compared to
aspirin (HR 0.56, 95% CI 0.27 to 1.15, p = 0.12), but major
bleeding was increased (HR 4.04, 95% CI 1.99 to 8.22, p <0.001). In conclusion, existing
bleeding risk scores can identify
bleeding risk in patients with HFrEF in SR and could be tested for potentially identifying patients with a favorable risk/benefit profile for antithrombotic
therapy with
warfarin.