• Sao Paulo Med J · Jan 2022

    Usefulness of the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio in predicting the severity of COVID-19 patients: a retrospective cohort study.

    • Erdal Yılmaz, Rohat Ak, and Fatih Doğanay.
    • MD. Specialist in Emergency Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Kartal Dr. Lütfi Kırdar Şehir Hastanesi, Istanbul, Turkey.
    • Sao Paulo Med J. 2022 Jan 1; 140 (1): 81-86.

    BackgroundQuick and accurate identification of critically ill patients ensures appropriate and correct use of medical resources. In situations that threaten public health, like pandemics, rapid and effective methods are needed for early disease detection among critically ill patients.ObjectiveTo determine the relationship between the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) patients upon admission to the emergency department (ED) and these patients' prognosis.Design And SettingRetrospective cohort study among COVID-19 patients in the ED of a tertiary-level hospital.MethodsData on patients' age, gender, vital signs, chronic diseases, laboratory tests and clinical outcomes were collected from electronic medical records. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed. The area under the curve (AUC) was used to assess the accuracy of NLR for predicting in-hospital mortality risk and intensive care unit (ICU) requirement. The Youden J index (YJI) was used to determine optimal threshold values.Results1,175 patients were included. Their median age was 63 years (IQR, 48-75). With an NLR cutoff value of 5.14, the sensitivity, specificity, PPV, AUC and YJI for ICU requirement were calculated as 77.87%, 74.08%, 92.4%, 0.811 and 0.5194, respectively. With the same cutoff value, the sensitivity, specificity, AUC and YJI for in-hospital mortality were 77.27%, 75.82%, 0.815 and 0.5309, respectively. In addition, advanced age, leukocytosis, anemia and lymphopenia were found to be associated with poor prognosis.ConclusionThe NLR, which is a widely available simple parameter, can provide rapid insights regarding early recognition of critical illness and prognosis among COVID-19 patients.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…