Background: The Can Rapid Risk Stratification of Unstable Angina Patients Suppress Adverse Outcomes With Early Implementation of the ACC/AHA Guidelines (CRUSADE) model provides a risk score that predicts the likelihood of major bleeding in patients hospitalized for non-ST-elevation acute myocardial infarction. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the performance of this model in a contemporary cohort of patients hospitalized for non-ST-elevation acute myocardial infarction in Spain.
Methods and results: The study subjects were 782 consecutive patients admitted to our center between February 2004 and June 2009 with non-ST-elevation acute myocardial infarction. For each patient, we calculated the CRUSADE risk score and evaluated its discrimination and calibration by the C statistic and the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test, respectively. The performance of the CRUSADE risk score was evaluated for the patient population as a whole and for groups of patients treated with or without >or=2 antithrombotic medications and who underwent cardiac catheterization or not. The median CRUSADE score was 30 points (range, 18 to 45). A total of 657 patients (84%) were treated with >or=2 antithrombotic, of whom 609 (92.7%) underwent cardiac catheterization. The overall incidence of major bleeding was 9.5%. This incidence increased with the risk category: very low, 1.5%; low, 4.3%; moderate, 7.8%; high, 11.8%; and very high, 28.9% (P<0.001). For the patients as a whole, for the groups treated with or without >or=2 antithrombotics, and for the subgroup treated with >or=2 antithrombotics who did or did not undergo cardiac catheterization, the CRUSADE score showed adequate calibration and excellent discriminatory capacity (Hosmer-Lemeshow P>0.3 and C values of 0.82, 0.80, 0.70, and 0.80, respectively). However, it showed little capacity to discriminate bleeding risk in patients treated with >or=2 antithrombotics who did not undergo cardiac catheterization (C=0.56).
Conclusions: The CRUSADE risk score was generally validated and found to be useful in a Spanish cohort of patients treated with or without >or=2 antithrombotics and in those treated with or without >or=2 antithrombotics who underwent cardiac catheterization. More studies are needed to clarify the validity of the CRUSADE score in the subgroup treated with >or=2 antithrombotics who do not undergo cardiac catheterization.