The Predictive Value of Glasgow-Blatchford Score: The Experience of an Emergency Department

INTRODUCTION

Upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGB) is a common emergency and a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. An early and accurate assessment at admission is essential to estimate the severity of each case, assisting in the management of patients. The Glasgow-Blatchford score (GBS) is currently recommended for risk stratification of UGB in the emergency department (ED), helping triage patients to in-hospital vs. ambulatory management. The aim of this study was to test the validity of the GBS in an ED.

METHODS

Patients who presented to the ED with a diagnosis of UGB between 2017 and 2018 were retrospectively analyzed.

RESULTS

The mean GBS value of the 149 patients included in the study was 10.3. Of the patients, 4.3% had values ≤1 and 8.7% had values ≤3. The sensitivity and negative predictive value for intervention needs (98.9% and 91.7%) and complications in 30 days (100% and 100%) remained high with a threshold ≤3. In the receiver operating characteristic curves, GBS presented an area under the curve of 0.883 and 0.625, regarding the need for intervention and complications in 30 days, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

In our population, the threshold ≤2, and eventually ≤3, allows the identification of twice as many low-risk patients, manageable as outpatients, without significant increases in intervention needs or complications in 30 days.

Comparison of Risk Stratification Scores for Patients Presenting with Symptoms of Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding in the Emergency Department

Objective

To compare four scoring systems to predict outcomes in patients with symptoms of upper gastrointestinal bleeding presenting to the emergency department.

Method

A single centered prospective cohort study. All adult patients presenting to the emergency department of the studying centre with haematemsis or tarry stool or coffee ground vomiting or coffee ground aspirate from nasogastric tube were included from February 2012 to April 2012. The outcome variables include mortality, length of stay in hospital, blood product transfusion and interventions for bleeding control. The AIMS65 score, pre-endoscopic Rockall score, Glasgow Blatchford Score (GBS) and the modified Glasgow Blatchford Score (mGBS) were evaluated. Diagnostic characteristics were presented and areas under the receiver-operating-characteristic (AUROC) curve were compared.

Results

A total of 129 patients were included in the study. 81 of them (62.8%) had upper endoscopy performed. The mortality rate was 3.1%. Initial haemoglobin level of <10 was an important factor in risk stratification. Validation of the 4 scoring systems showed GBS had highest sensitivities (98.3-100%) and negative predictive values (90-100%) for all outcome variables but could not achieve a good specificity and positive predictive values against the outcomes. Both GBS and modified GBS outperformed the other two scoring systems in the AUROC curves in predicting composite high-risk outcome, length of stay in hospital and blood transfusion.

Conclusion

GBS appeared the best scoring system in the emergency department for screening purpose and to stratify those high risk patients for admission and low risk patients for out-patient management. (Hong Kong j.emerg.med. 2016;23:199-209)