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Introduction: Patients with upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGIB) are at risk for serious adverse events (SAE) after emergency department (ED) discharge. Endoscopy can aid in risk stratification but is not easily available. Therefore, stratifying using pre-endoscopic risk scores can aid ED physicians in disposition decisions. The aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review to assess the predictive value of pre-endoscopic risk scores for risk-stratification of ED UGIB patients. Methods: We searched 4 databases from inception to March 2015 with search terms related to “UGIB” and “ED”. Inclusion criteria were: 1) adult UGIB patients presenting to the ED; 2) risk scores without endoscopic predictors developed and validated in variceal and non-variceal UGIB patients. We excluded case reports, reviews, abstracts, animal studies and commentaries. In 2 phases (screening and full-review), 2 reviewers independently screened articles for inclusion. SAE included 30-day death, recurrent bleeding and need for intervention. Two reviewers independently extracted patient level data and the consensus data was used for analysis. We report kappa for the article selection, and pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value, positive and negative likelihood ratios and accuracy with 95% CI for the risk scores. Results: We identified 3,173 articles, of which 3,065 were excluded in phase I (kappa 0.88, 95% CI 0.83-0.93). In phase II, we included 16 of the 108 remaining articles (kappa 0.84, 95% CI 0.70-0.97); 3 studied Glasgow Blatchford Score (GBS), 1 clinical Rockall score (cRockall) and 2 AIMS65; 6 compared GBS and cRockall, 3 compared GBS, a modification of the GBS and cRockall and 1 compared the GBS and AIMS65. Overall, the accuracy of the GBS, cRockall and AIMS65 was 0.47 (95% CI 0.46-0.47), 0.47 (95% CI 0.46-0.49) and 0.62 (95% CI 0.61-0.62), respectively. The accuracy for the GBS with a cut-off score of 2 was 0.73 (95% CI 0.71-0.74). Conclusion: None of the risk scores identified by our systematic review were robust and hence, cannot be recommended for use in clinical practice. However, the GBS with a cut-off score of 2 was superior over other risk scores. Future prospective studies are needed to develop robust new scores for use in ED patients with UGIB.
