Barnett-Griness O, Stein N, Kotler A, et al. - For patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (AF) treated with new oral anticoagulants (NOACs), a novel and simple risk score for prediction of major bleeding was introduced in this study.

• This study involved 47,623 patients with AF prescribed NOAC.

• A total of 28,055 patients with AF, initiators of apixaban (mean age 78.7, SD 9.0), were incorporated in the first phase and suffered 662 major bleeding events.

• A final points-based risk-scoring system was constructed by incorporating nine variables: male gender, anemia, thrombocytopenia, concurrent antiplatelet therapy, hypertension, prior major bleeding, risk factors for a fall, low cholesterol level and low estimated glomerular filtration rate.

• Apparent area-under-curve was 0.6546.

• The model showed applicability for 14,118 and 5,450 AF patients, initiators of dabigatran and rivaroxaban, where the score achieved c indices of 0.62 and 0.61, respectively.