Neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio as an independent risk factor for mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19

By Yuwei Liu, Xuebei Du, J. Chen, Ya-lei Jin, Li Peng, H. H. Wang, Mingqi Luo, Ling Chen, Yan Zhao. Journal of Infection, 2020

907 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Several studies have described the clinical characteristics of patients with novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infected pneumonia (COVID-19), indicating severe patients tended to have higher neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR). Whether baseline NLR could be an independent predictor of in-hospital death in Chinese COVID-19 patients remains to be investigated. Methods A cohort of patients with COVID-19 admitted to the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University from January 1 to February 29 was retrospectively analyzed. The baseline data of laboratory examinations, including NLR, were collected. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression models were developed to assess the independent relationship between the baseline NLR and in-hospital all-cause death. A sensitivity analysis was performed by converting NLR from a continuous variable to a categorical variable according to tertile. Interaction and stratified analyses were conducted as well. Results 245 COVID-19 patients were included in the final analyses, and the in-hospital mortality was 13.47%. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that there was 8% higher risk of in-hospital mortality for each unit increase in NLR (Odds ratio [OR] = 1.08; 95% confidence interval [95% CI], 1.01 to 1.14; P = 0.0147). Compared with patients in the lowest tertile, the NLR of patients in the highest tertile had a 15.04-fold higher risk of death (OR = 16.04; 95% CI, 1.14 to 224.95; P = 0.0395) after adjustment for potential confounders. Notably, the fully adjusted OR for mortality was 1.10 in males for each unit increase of NLR (OR = 1.10; 95% CI, 1.02 to 1.19; P = 0.016). Conclusions NLR is an independent risk factor of the in-hospital mortality for COVID-19 patients especially for male. Assessment of NLR may help identify high risk individuals with COVID-19.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29f52807031d664e9dad80284e0cb25bbc6160e8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Infectious Diseases

In Oncology

Citations in the corpus

Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio: An Emerging Marker of the Relationships between the Immune System and Diseases (2022, result): “Its predictive value for progression of severe disease [37] and mortality [38] was largely confirmed by several studies [39,40].”
Is diabetes mellitus associated with mortality and severity of COVID-19? A meta-analysis (2020, neutral): “Liu Y [79] 10-Apr-20 32283162 Single centre in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China 9”
COVID-19 and the human innate immune system (2021, background): “, 2020), and an elevated neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio has been introduced as a biomarker of disease severity (Kuri-Cervantes et al., 2020; Lagunas-Rangel, 2020; Liu et al., 2020; Qin et al., 2020).”