Association of the neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio with survival patients with in metastatic breast cancer.

Abstract

e11544 Background: Identification of simple and measurable prognostic factors is an important issue in treatment evaluation of breast cancer. Although various markers are considered while making a decision to treatment modality, clinicians investigate for new prognostic factors for reason of highly variable responses of individuals. Therefore, this study estimates the survival probability of the neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) for patients with metastatic breast cancer. Methods: We included the patients with metastatic breast carcinoma who were treated for metastasis. NLR were calculated and patients were divided into four quartiles (25th, 50th and 75th NLR; the lowest being the 1st quartile, the highest being 4th quartile ). Survival status was retrieved from our cancer registry. Survival analysis, stratified by NLR quartiles, was used to evaluate the predictive value of NLR. Results: Eighty-one patients with metastatic breast cancer were included in this study. Median age of diagnosis of the patients was 47 (26-83), the majority of them had grade II (%37) and grade III (%29.6) tumors and were metastatic at the time of their initial diagnosis. ER (+), PR (+) and HER2 (+) percentages were confirmed as 82%, 73% and 24% ,respectively. Ten percent of the patients were triple negative. Median follow-up time was 26 months and 29 patients died during the follow up period. We analyzed the overall survival among NLR quartiles. When we compared the quartiles with the highest and lowest NLR values, the quartile with the lowest NLR values had longer median overall survival than the quartile with the highest NLR values (212 vs. 27 months; p=0.01). The second and third quartiles, however, showed no statistically significant difference of overall survival between four quartiles. Conclusions: NLR can be a prognostic factor for overall survival in metastatic breast cancer patients.