Clinical significance of preoperative inflammatory markers in non-small cell lung cancer patients: A multicenter retrospective study

Inflammatory biomarkers have been associated with clinical outcomes in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, the best prognostic marker(s) has not been identified, and the association between inflammatory markers and clinical characteristics is poorly understood. We selected 1,237 patients with resected NSCLC from Kyushu University (2003–2015) and Kyushu Cancer Center (2009–2015) in Japan. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient among inflammatory markers and area under curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses for overall survival (OS) were calculated. We analyzed the associations between inflammatory markers and clinical factors using Student’s t-test. Univariate and multivariate analyses with Cox proportional hazards regression analyses were performed to evaluate the relationship between survival and clinical factors. The cut-off values for neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), lymphocyte-monocyte ratio (LMR), platelet-lymphocyte ratio, and derived NLR (dNLR) were determined by ROC curve analyses for OS. We found a strong positive correlation between NLR and dNLR (r = 0.9629). The AUC of LMR was the highest amongst the measured metrics, and the AUC of NLR was higher than dNLR. Levels of some inflammatory markers were associated with sex, smoking, squamous cell carcinoma, and pathological stage. LMR ≥ 5.11 and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) concentration ≥ 222 (U/L) were independent predictors of both disease-free survival (DFS) and OS (LMR; P = 0.0009 and 0.0008, LDH; P = 0.0195 and 0.0187, respectively). Certain inflammatory markers, potentially linked to smoking, were associated with an advanced pathological stage in NSCLC. LMR and LDH were independent predictors of both DFS and OS.