A limitation of the prognostic factor peripheral blood absolute lymphocyte/monocyte ratio (ALC/AMC) at diagnosis in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is its inability to sequentially assess the host/tumor microenvironment interaction and clinical outcomes during treatment. Therefore, we studied the ALC/AMC ratio at each rituximab, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine and prednisone (R-CHOP) cycle as a predictor for survival. We studied 107 consecutive patients with DLBCL diagnosed, treated only with R-CHOP and followed at the Mayo Clinic. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering identified four clusters based on the patterns of ALC/AMC ratio recovery during cycles. The most inferior survival was seen in the cluster with ALC/AMC ratio < 1.1 in all cycles. By multivariate analysis, ALC/AMC ratio < 1.1 during all cycles was an independent predictor for inferior overall survival and progression-free survival. The ALC/AMC ratio during R-CHOP cycles predicts survival and provides a platform to develop therapeutic modalities to manipulate the ALC/AMC ratio during R-CHOP cycles to improve DLBCL clinical outcomes.
Keywords: Lymphocytes; lymphoma and Hodgkin disease; monocytes.