Pretreatment lymphocyte to monocyte ratio as a predictor of prognosis in patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the lymphocyte to monocyte ratio (LMR) is a useful prognostic factor in various cancers. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the association between pretreatment LMR, disease-free survival (DFS), and overall survival (OS) in patients with early-stage (I to III) triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Pretreatment LMR with corresponding clinical features from 230 TNBC patients was noted. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for survival prediction was plotted to verify the optimal cutoff values for LMR, lymphocyte, and monocyte counts. The difference between variables was calculated using chi-square tests. The Kaplan–Meier method and univariate and multivariate Cox regression models were applied to assess OS and DFS. Based on the ROC analysis, the optimal cutoff point for LMR was 4.7. Associations between high LMR (≥4.7) and significantly small tumor size (P = 0.005) and TNM stage (P = 0.013) were found, although there was no significant association for other clinical pathological factors. In the multivariate analysis, LMR was a significant predictive factor for both OS (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.42; 95 % confidence interval [CI], 0.19–0.95; P < 0.001) and DFS (HR = 0.40; 95 % CI, 0.20–0.79; P < 0.001). In addition, the predictive values of the OS and DFS were also observed for absolute counts of lymphocytes (P < 0.001) and monocytes (P < 0.001). Our study suggests that pretreatment LMR may be a predictive factor for long-term survival in patients with early-stage TNBC.