Proportion of Neutrophils in White Blood Cells as a Useful Marker for Predicting Bacteremic Acute Cholangitis

OBJECTIVE: A positive hemoculture in acute cholangitis is serious, but a blood culture result cannot be obtained at the initial diagnosis and so cannot be used for the severity assessment and decision-making concerning urgent/early biliary drainage. Accordingly, a predictor for bacteremia at the initial diagnosis of acute cholangitis would be particularly useful. We investigated the association between neutrophil proportions in white blood cell counts (%Neutro) and bacteremic acute cholangitis. METHODS: Of 166 patients with acute cholangitis who were diagnosed with the Tokyo Guidelines 2018/2013 from April 2015 to March 2017, a total of 94 underwent blood culture assessments and were divided into those with a positive hemoculture (n=48) and a negative hemoculture (n=46) and then compared. A receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to evaluate the predictive ability of %Neutro and other inflammatory markers. RESULTS: The %Neutro values were significantly higher in the positive hemoculture group than in the negative hemoculture group (91.7±4.0% vs. 82.5±9.0%, p<0.0001). A cut-off %Neutro value of 89.7% was strongly associated with bacteremia (area under the curve 0.86, sensitivity 77.1%, specificity 80.4%). A %Neutro of ≥89.7% was a predictor of a positive hemoculture in univariate (p<0.0001) and multivariate analyses (p<0.001). Patients with a %Neutro ≥89.7% needed early biliary drainage more frequently than others (30/46, 65.2% vs. 18/48, 37.5%, p=0.0063). CONCLUSION: %Neutro is an independent predictor of bacteremia in patients with acute cholangitis and may contribute to decision-making concerning early biliary drainage.