Hospitalized women experiencing an episode of excessive oral anticoagulation had a higher bleeding risk than men.

Objective: Overanticoagulated medical inpatients may be particularly prone to bleeding complications. Among medical inpatients with excessive oral anticoagulation (AC), we sought to identify patient and treatment factors associated with bleeding.

Methods: We prospectively identified consecutive patients receiving oral AC admitted to the medical ward of a university hospital (February-July 2006) who had at least one international normalized ratio (INR) value >3.