Hematological parameters in measles

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to investigate the WBC, MCV, MPV, PLT, CRP, Neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio, platelet-lymphocyte, and PLR values of the patients with measles and compare them with the healthy control group to see if these parameters are suitable to determine the inflammatory disease in measles patients. Material and Methods: Eighty patients with measles who had applied to our pediatrics clinic between January 2019 and December 2019 as the case group and 80 healthy children who applied to our clinic for any rea-son as the control group were included in our study. SPSS version 26.0 was applied. Normal distribution of the data was demonstrated with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Mann-Whitney U test and Independent stu-dent t-test were used to evaluate the differences between two groups related to demographical and clinical variables. Spearman correlation test was applied to assess the correlation between NLR and PLR and the outcome. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed for the independent variables after the univariate logistic regression. Results: WBC in the case group was significantly lower than that in the control group (p= 0.035). Besides, the values of neutrophil (p< 0.001), hemoglobin (p< 0.001), hematocrit (p< 0.001), MCV (p< 0.001), MPV (p= 0.001), NLR (p< 0.001) and PLR (p= 0.011) were significantly lower in the case group than those in the control group while the values of lym-phocyte (p= 0.001), and CRP (p< 0.001) were higher in the case group. NLR showed a significant correlation with outcome (r= 0.382, p< 0.001). Besides, PLR was significantly correlated with outcome (r= 0.201, p= 0.011). PLR was associated with the outcome (OR, 0.961; CI, 0.924-1.000; p= 0.049) whilst NLR was not significantly associated with outcome (OR, 2.241; CI, 0.623-8.058; p= 0.217). Conclusion: It is concluded that WBC can be used as a suitable parameter for evaluating inflammation, and neutrophil, hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCV, MPV, NLR, and PLR can be used to predict measles. NLR is a poor predictor of measles while PLR is a suitable predictor of patient outcome in measles.