The Correlation Between Platelet-to-Lymphocyte Ratio and Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio with Hepatic Echinococcosis

J Inflamm Res. 2021 Jun 3:14:2403-2409. doi: 10.2147/JIR.S304307. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Objective: To explore the correlation between neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) with hepatic hydatid diseases.

Methods: The clinical data of 420 patients with hydatid disease who were treated in our hospital from October 2015 to October 2018 were collected from the database of our hospital. According to the postoperative pathological diagnosis, 200 patients were assigned into the alveolar echinococcosis (AE) group, and 220 patients were assigned into the cystic echinococcosis (CE) group. A total of 160 healthy examinees were enrolled as the control group. The main observation indexes included preoperative PLR and NLR. Pearson's correlation was used to analyze the correlation between PLR and NLR with clinical indicators in HE patients, and the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve was used to evaluate the clinical values of PLR and NLR in diagnosing different types of hydatid diseases.

Results: The results revealed that the expressions of PLR and NLR were significantly higher in the AE group than in the CE and control groups (P<0.05). The results of multiple linear regression analysis revealed that PLR was positively correlated with aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, total bilirubin, direct bilirubin, alkaline phosphatase and γ-glutamyltranspeptidase (P<0.05). NLR was correlated with albumin content (P<0.05). ROC curve analysis results revealed that the area under the curve (AUC) of PLR and NLR for AE was 0.800 and 0.700 respectively, and the AUC for CE was 0.78 and 0.75 respectively.

Conclusion: The NLR and PLR of AE patients were higher than those of CE patients, and the high inflammation of CE patients may be correlated to the reproductive mode of Echinococcus multilocularis. PLR and NLR have certain diagnostic values for disease classification, but PLR has higher specificity when compared with NLR.

Keywords: NLR; PLR; alveolar echinococcosis; cystic echinococcosis; inflammation; neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio; platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Qinghai Science and Technology Department Project (grant 2018-ZJ-757).