Preoperative systemic inflammation score (SIS) is superior to neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) as a predicting indicator in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to assess the prognostic significance of preoperative systemic inflammation score (SIS) on patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). METHODS: A total of 357 ESCC patients who accepted radical esophagectomy between January 2008 and December 2009 at our institution were recruited in the analysis. The cut-off finder application was used to calculate the optimal cutoff values. The Chi-squared test or Fisher’s exact test were used to analyze categorical variables. Overall survival (OS) was calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method and the log-rank test. Multivariate analysis was calculated using Cox regression analysis model. A model combining SIS was created and its performance was evaluated using the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and concordance index (C-index). RESULTS: The median follow-up time was 58 months (range, 1–84 months). The 5-year OS rate was 50% (95% CI, 49.94–50.06%). The optimal cut-off values for preoperative neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR), lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR) and serum albumin (Alb) were 2.27, 3.79 and 36.55, respectively. Univariate analyses revealed that gender (P = 0.047), T stage (P < 0.001), N stage (P < 0.001), vascular invasion (P < 0.001), tumor location (P = 0.018), tumor length(P < 0.001), NLR (P = 0.006), LMR (P = 0.007), serum Alb (P = 0.001), and SIS (P < 0.001) were significantly associated with OS. Independent prognostic factors for OS were T stage, N stage, tumor location, tumor length, and SIS. However, NLR was not an independent prognostic factor in multivariate analysis. The model combining SIS had smaller AIC and higher C-index compared to the model without SIS, which suggesting that the adding the SIS to the multivariate model increasing the predictive accuracy of the OS in the ESCC patients treated with radical esophagectomy and 3-field lymphadenectomy (3-FL). CONCLUSIONS: SIS may treat as a novel prognostic factor than NLR for ESCC patients who underwent radical esophagectomy and 3-FL. However, Larger-scale studies are needed to validate these findings. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-019-5940-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.