Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the prognostic values of Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 (NRS-2002) and hematologic inflammation markers in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) receiving curative esophagectomy.
Materials and methods: A total of 277 patients with ESCC treated with standard curative esophagectomy were retrospectively analyzed. These patients were grouped for further analysis according to the systemic inflammation score (SIS), the combination of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (CNP) score and NRS-2002 score. The Kaplan–Meier method and log-rank test were adopted to calculate and compare the progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) rates with these parameters. The Cox proportional hazards model was used to carry out univariate and multivariate analyses. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were applied to verify the accuracy of SIS, CNP and NRS-2002 for survival prediction.
Results: In univariate analysis, the following factors were significantly associated with poor PFS and OS: sex, T stage, N stage, TNM stage, SIS, CNP and NRS-2002 (all P <0.05). Furthermore, multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that CNP (hazard ratio [HR]=1.602; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.341–1.913; P =0.000), NRS-2002 (HR=2.062; 95% CI 1.523–2.792; P =0.000) and TNM stage (HR=1.194; 95% CI 1.058–1.565; P =0.048) were independent prognostic factors for PFS. Correspondingly, CNP (HR=1.707; 95% CI 1.405–2.074; P =0.000), NRS-2002 (HR=2.716; 95% CI 1.972–3.740; P =0.000) and TNM stage (HR=1.363; 95% CI 1.086–1.691; P =0.036) were also independent prognostic factors for OS. Finally, the results of ROC curves indicated that CNP and NRS-2002 were superior to SIS as a predictive factor for PFS or OS in patients with ESCC receiving surgery.
Conclusion: This study demonstrated that CNP combined with NRS-2002 is promising as a predictive marker for predicting clinical outcomes in patients with ESCC receiving surgery.
Keywords: esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, surgery, hematological markers, nutritional risk screening, prognosis