A prospective, open-labeled, and randomized trial for assessing safety and clinical utility of gastric biopsies during emergency gastroscopy for patients with bleeding gastric ulcers

Objective There is no consensus on whether a gastroscopic biopsy is necessary during the emergency treatment of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases such as gastric ulcer bleeding. In this study, we examined the clinical utility and safety of an emergency gastroscopic biopsy for the assessment of gastric ulcer bleeding.Methods We enrolled 150 patients with a single bleeding gastric ulcer after emergency gastroscopy (EG) from April 2020 to April 2022. The patients were randomly divided into the biopsy and no biopsy groups, and they were followed-up until June 2022 to examine whether recurrent gastric ulcer bleeding had occurred.Results Re-bleeding occurred in 15 out of 150 (10%) patients. We diagnosed malignancies in 17 (11.3%) patients and validated 14 (9.3%) of them during the initial gastroscopy procedure. Factors that could predict the occurrence of gastric ulcer re-bleeding with biopsy during EG included an absence of ischemic heart disease (odds ratio [OR] = 0.395, confidence interval [CI]: 0.24–0.65, p ≤ .005), renal disease (OR = 1.74, CI: 0.77–1.59, p ≤ .005), and using warfarin or oral anticoagulants (OR = 11.953, CI: 3.494–39.460, p ≤ .005). No significant differences were observed in 60-day bleeding (p = .077) and the duration of hospitalization (p = .700) between the two groups.Conclusions Patients undergoing biopsy during EG did not exhibit an increased risk of re-bleeding compared with those who did not undergo a biopsy. An early biopsy facilitates an early pathologic diagnosis, early clinical intervention, safe discharge of low-risk patients, and improved outcomes in high-risk patients.