The neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio to predict poor prognosis of critical acute myocardial infarction patients: a retrospective cohort study.

Abstract

Inflammation is closely related to adverse outcomes of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). This study aimed to evaluate whether neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) can predict poor prognosis of critical AMI patients. We designed a retrospective cohort study and extracted AMI patients from the "Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-III" database. The primary outcome was 1-year all-cause mortality. The secondary outcomes were 90-day and in-hospital all-cause mortalities, and acute kidney injury (AKI) incidence. The optimal cut-offs of NLR were picked by X-tile software according to the 1-year mortality and patient groups were created: low-NLR (< 4.8), high-NLR (4.8 - 21.1), and very high-NLR (> 21.1). Cox and modified Poisson regression models were used to evaluate the effect of NLR on outcomes in critically AMI patients. Finally, 782 critical AMI patients were enrolled in this study, and the 1-year mortality was 32% (249/782). The high- and very high-NLR groups had a higher incidence of outcomes than the low-NLR group (P < 0.05). The multivariate regression analyses found that the high- and very high-NLR groups had a higher risk of 1-year mortality (Hazard ratio (HR) = 1.59, 95% CI: 1.12 to 2.24, P = 0.009 and HR = 1.73, 95% CI: 1.09 to 2.73, P = 0.020), 90-day mortality (HR = 1.69, 95% CI: 1.13 to 2.54, P = 0.011 and HR = 1.90, 95% CI: 1.13 to 3.20, P = 0.016), in-hospital mortality (Relative risk (RR) = 1.77, 95% CI: 1.14 to 2.74, P = 0.010 and RR = 2.10, 95% CI: 1.23 to 3.58, P = 0.007), and AKI incidence (RR = 1.44, 95% CI: 1.06 to 1.95, P = 0.018 and RR = 1.34, 95% CI: 0.87 to 2.07, P = 0.180) compared with low-NLR group. NLR retained stable predictive ability in sensitivity analyses. Baseline NLR is an independent risk factor for 1-year mortality, 90-day mortality, in-hospital mortality, and AKI incidence in AMI patients.