domingo, 5 de agosto de 2018

Sex Differences in Using Systemic Inflammatory Markers to Prognosticate Patients with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma. - PubMed - NCBI

2018 Jul 26. pii: cebp.0408.2018. doi: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-18-0408. [Epub ahead of print]

Sex Differences in Using Systemic Inflammatory Markers to Prognosticate Patients with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

Lin CY1, Kwon H2, Rangel Rivera GO2, Li X3, Chung D4, Li Z5.

Author information

Abstract

BACKGROUND:

Remarkable discrepancy exists in outcomes between men/women for multiple malignancies. We sought to expose sex differences in using platelet count and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) to predict overall survival for select cancer types with focus on head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).

METHODS:

Peripheral blood samples from 9365 patients seen in a tertiary teaching hospital with nine different primary tumors were retrospectively examined. HNSCC RNA-sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas were analyzed by two computational means (CIBERSORT and ESTIMATE) to extend our observations to the tumor microenvironment.

RESULTS:

For HNSCC, platelet count was more predictive of overall survival for males (Log-rank test: HR = 1.809, 95% CI: 1.461-2.239 vs. HR = 1.287, 95% CI: 0.8901-1.861) while NLR was more predictive for females (HR = 2.627, 95% CI: 1.716-4.02 vs. HR = 1.261, 95% CI 0.998-1.593). For females, lymphocyte count was more associated with survival than neutrophil count (multivariate Cox regression: p = 0.0015 vs p = 0.7476). Both CIBERSORT (p = 0.0061) and ESTIMATE (p = 0.022) revealed greater immune infiltration in females. High tumor infiltration by T lymphocytes was more strikingly associated with survival in females (HR = 0.20, p = 0.0281) than in males (HR = 0.49, p = 0.0147).

CONCLUSIONS:

This is the first study to comprehensively demonstrate sex bias in the clinical utility of platelet, granulocyte and lymphocyte counts as biomarkers to prognosticate HNSCC patients.