Abstract
Inflammation has been reported to play an important role in cancer progression and various inflammatory markers have been reported to be useful prognostic markers. The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate the significance of the C-reactive protein to albumin (CRP/ALB) ratio in colorectal cancer patients who received palliative chemotherapy. We performed a retrospective review of 99 patients who underwent palliative chemotherapy for unresectable colorectal cancer between 2005 and 2010. The cutoff value of the CRP/ALB ratio was determined based on a receiver operating characteristics curve analysis. The relationship between the CRP/ALB ratio and survival was assessed. The cutoff value for the CRP/ALB ratio was 0.183. The high pretreatment CRP/ALB ratio group showed significantly worse overall survival. Patients with a high pretreatment CRP/ALB ratio and in whom the CRP/ALB ratio normalized after chemotherapy tended to have better overall survival than those in whom both the pretreatment and posttreatment CRP/ALB ratios were high. The CRP/ALB ratio is a useful marker for predicting survival and monitoring chemotherapeutic effectiveness in patients with unresectable metastatic colorectal cancer.
Highlights
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death worldwide (Edwards et al 2014)
The C-reactive protein-to-albumin (CRP/ALB) ratio has been reported to be a more accurate prognostic value in patients with various malignancies than the modified Glasgow prognostic score (Kinoshita et al 2015; Xu et al 2015), which is calculated from the serum CRP and ALB concentration, and we previously reported on the prognostic significance of the CRP/ALB ratio in patients
The aim of the present study is to evaluate the significance of the CRP/ALB ratio as a marker for predicting survival and monitoring chemotherapeutic effectiveness in patients with unresectable metastatic CRC
Summary
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death worldwide (Edwards et al 2014). Unresectable metastasis is one of the most important prognostic factors for patients with CRC (Shibutani et al 2015b). Aside from our report, there have only been a few reports regarding the prognostic significance of the CRP/ALB ratio in patients with CRC (Ishizuka et al 2016). To the best of our knowledge, there are no published studies regarding the prognostic significance of the CRP/ALB ratio in patients with unresectable metastatic CRC. We applied this marker to patients with unresectable metastatic CRC and compared the usefulness of the CRP/ALB ratio with that of other inflammatory markers for predicting and monitoring the therapeutic outcome
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