Background: Various factors regarding the biological state of tumors or the nutritional status of patients have been reported individually to correlate with prognosis. Identification of defined patient groups based on a prognostic score may improve the prediction of survival and individualization of therapy. The aim of the present study was to identify clinically useful parameters obtainable before treatment that could be used for predicting clinical outcomes in patients with gastric cancer.
Methods: In 357 consecutive patients who had been treated for potentially curable gastric cancer, we retrospectively analyzed the following clinicopathological factors: sex, age, body mass index, body weight changes, hemoglobin, white blood cell count, neutrophil to lymphocyte (N/L) ratio, serum C-reactive protein (CRP), serum albumin, serum cholinesterase, tumor location, tumor size, histology, and clinical tumor node metastasis (TNM) stage. Factors related to prognosis were evaluated by univariate and multivariate analysis.
Results: From univariate analysis, significant differences in survival were found for age, hemoglobin, N/L ratio, serum CRP, serum albumin, serum cholinesterase, tumor size, and clinical T and N grouping. N/L ratio, tumor size, and clinical T grouping were identified as independent prognostic indicators in multivariate analysis. A prognostic score was constructed using these variables to estimate the probability of death. The model gave an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.85 for prediction of death at 5 years.
Conclusions: This model based on N/L ratio, tumor size, and clinical T grouping before treatment offers a very informative scoring system for predicting prognosis of gastric cancer.