Background: Patients with cancer-associated venous thromboembolism (VTE) are at high risk for recurrent VTE and are recommended to receive prolonged anticoagulation therapy if they are at a low risk for bleeding. However, there are no established risk factors for bleeding during anticoagulation therapy.
Methods and results: The COMMAND VTE Registry is a multicenter retrospective registry enrolling 3,027 consecutive patients with acute symptomatic VTE among 29 Japanese centers. The present study population consisted of 592 cancer-associated VTE patients with anticoagulation therapy. We constructed a multivariable Cox proportional hazard model to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of the potential risk factors for major bleeding. During a median follow-up period of 199 days, major bleeding occurred in 72 patients. The cumulative incidence of major bleeding was 5.8% at 3 months, 13.8% at 1 year, 17.5% at 2 years, and 28.1% at 5 years. The most frequent major bleeding site was gastrointestinal tract (47%). Terminal cancer (adjusted HR, 4.17; 95% CI, 2.22-7.85, P<0.001), chronic kidney disease (adjusted HR, 1.89; 95% CI 1.06-3.37, P=0.031), and gastrointestinal cancer (adjusted HR, 1.78; 95% CI, 1.04-3.04, P=0.037) were independently associated with an increased risk of major bleeding.
Conclusions: Major bleeding events were common during anticoagulation therapy in real-world cancer-associated VTE patients. Terminal cancer, chronic kidney disease, and gastrointestinal cancer were the independent risk factors for major bleeding.
Keywords: Anticoagulants; Cancer; Hemorrhage; Risk assessment; Venous thromboembolism.