Hypocholesterolaemia is associated with elevated cancer risk and mortality, yet the relation between chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) and serum lipid profile remains unclear. Our study aims to evaluate the prognostic value of cholesterol levels in CLL and develop a prognostic nomogram that incorporates lipid metabolism. We enrolled 761 newly diagnosed CLL patients and separated them into either derivation (n = 507) or validation (n = 254) cohorts. The prognostic nomogram was constructed through multivariate Cox regression analyses, with performance evaluated using C-index, the area under the curve, calibration, and decision curve analyses. Decreased total cholesterol (TC), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) at diagnosis were significantly associated with worse time to first treatment (TTFT) and cancer-specific survival (CSS), and simultaneously, low HDL-C with low LDL-C was identified as an independent prognostic indicator for both TTFT and CSS. CLL patients achieving complete or partial remission post-chemotherapy had significantly increased TC, HDL-C, and LDL-C levels compared with the baseline, and post-therapeutic HDL-C and LDL-C elevation correlated with favourable survival. The prognostic nomogram augmenting the CLL international prognostic index with low cholesterol levels yielded higher predictive accuracy and discrimination capacity for both 3-year and 5-year CSS. In conclusion, cholesterol profiles can be used as a cheap and readily accessible tool for predicting prognosis in CLL practice.
Keywords: CLL-IPI; chronic lymphocytic leukaemia; high-density lipoprotein cholesterol; low-density lipoprotein cholesterol; prognosis.