Preoperative C-reactive protein to albumin ratio is a predictor of survival after pancreatic resection for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.

AIM: Systemic inflammation and nutritional status are associated with clinical outcomes of cancer patients. We investigated the prognostic value of preoperative C-reactive protein to albumin ratio (CAR) in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) after pancreatic resection.

METHODS: One-hundred and thirty-six PDA patients who underwent pancreatic resection between January 2005 and June 2017 were retrospectively enrolled. Preoperative inflammation-based scores including CAR, modified Glasgow prognostic score (mGPS), neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio, platelet to lymphocyte ratio, lymphocyte to monocyte ratio (LMR) and prognostic nutritional index (PNI) were evaluated as potential predictor of overall survival (OS) using Cox regression models. An optimal cutoff value for the continuous variable was estimated by receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.

RESULTS: Patients were categorized by CAR using a cutoff value of 0.09. High CAR was associated with advanced stage, increased mGPS and decreased LMR and PNI, but not with other factors such as tumor location, preoperative biliary drainage or preoperative chemotherapy. In univariate analysis, patients with high CAR had poor OS compared with those with low CAR (P = 0.01). Multivariate analysis indicated that high CAR was an independent predictor of poor OS (P = 0.03) in addition to advanced stage and residual tumors. The predictive ability of CAR evaluated by area under the ROC curve was consistently higher than that of other inflammation-based factors.

CONCLUSION: Preoperative CAR was an independent and superior predictor of survival after pancreatic resection in patients with PDA. [Correction added on 17 January 2019, after first online publication: In Conclusion, "in" has been corrected to "independent" for clarity.].