Correction to: Comparative clinical outcomes between direct oral anticoagulants and warfarin among elderly patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation in the CMS Medicare population

Correction to: Journal of Thrombosis and Thrombolysis (2019) 48:240–249 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11239-019-01838-5

In the article by Amin et al., “Comparative clinical outcomes between direct oral anticoagulants and warfarin among elderly patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation in the CMS Medicare population” which was published online on March 28, 2019 (J Thromb and Thrombolysis 48:240–249), 2019, corrections are needed.

Due to an error in the underlying data cut received by the authors for the CMS Medicare database, a proportion of Medicare patients who should have been included in the analysis were inadvertently excluded. Specifically, those excluded patients were newly diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and initiated anticoagulation therapy in the same calendar year (2014 or 2015).

The authors have corrected the analyses by adding back those inadvertently excluded patients (Figs. 1, 2, 3, Tables 1, 2, and Supplemental Table 1). These corrections have increased the sample size from 198,321 to 366,425 patients.

Fig. 1

Patient selection criteria. *Edoxaban was not included in the analysis given the small sample size. AF atrial fibrillation, ICD-9-CM international classification of diseases, ninth revision, clinical modification, ICD-10-CM international classification of diseases, tenth revision, clinical modification, OAC oral anticoagulant

Fig. 2

Incidence rate and hazard ratio of stroke/SE and major bleeding for propensity score-matched patients. CI confidence interval, DOAC direct oral an-coagulant, GI gastrointesnal, ICH intracranial hemorrhage, SE systemic embolism. *Upper limit of 95% CI was rounded from 0.997 to 1.00

Fig. 3

Incidence rates and hazard ratios of net clinical outcome and MACE for propensity score-matched patient. CI confidence interval, DOAC direct oral an-coagulant, MACE major adverse cardiac events

Table 1 Baseline descriptive table before PSM

Table 2 Baseline descriptive and mean follow-up time table after PSM between warfarin and DOACs

Overall, the updated results were consistent with the original analyses. One change in statistical significance was observed for dabigatran versus warfarin: while directionally consistent with the original analysis, this updated analysis showed a lower risk of stroke/SE for dabigatran compared with warfarin. No other changes were observed in conclusions for either the direction of or the statistical significance for the comparative results.