Clinical significance of systemic inflammation markers in newly diagnosed, previously untreated hepatocellular carcinoma

This study aimed to investigate the clinical significance of systemic inflammation markers (SIMs)—including neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), and lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR)—in patients with newly diagnosed, previously untreated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The present study was performed using prospectively collected registry data of newly diagnosed, previously untreated HCC from a single institution. The training set included 6619 patients from 2005 to 2013 and the validation set included 2084 patients from 2014 to 2016. The SIMs as continuous variables significantly affected the overall survival (OS), and the optimal cut-off value of NLR, PLR, and LMR was 3.0, 100.0, and 3.0, respectively. There were significant correlations between SIMs and the albumin-bilirubin grade/Child-Turcotte-Pugh class (indicative of liver function status) and the staging system/portal vein invasion (indicative of the tumor burden). The OS curves were well stratified according to the prognostic model of SIMs and validated using the bootstrap method (1000 times, C-index 0.6367, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.6274–0.6459) and validation cohort (C-index 0.6810, 95% CI 0.6570–0.7049). SIMs showed significant prognostic ability for OS, independent of liver function and tumor extent, although these factors were significantly correlated with SIMs in patients with newly diagnosed, previously untreated HCC.