Pretreatment neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio but not platelet/lymphocyte ratio has a prognostic impact in multiple myeloma

BACKGROUND: We evaluated the prognostic significance of neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet/lymphocyte ratio (PLR) in patients with multiple myeloma (MM). METHODS: In total, we retrospectively analyzed 315 newly diagnosed MM patients and calculated NLR and PLR from the complete blood count of the untreated patients. We further assessed the role of pretreatment NLR and PLR on overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS). RESULTS: Multiple myeloma patients with high NLR (≥2) experienced shorter OS (P=.02) and PFS (P=.01) compared with patients with low NLR (<2). Furthermore, among the patients with conventional chemotherapy, elderly patients, or patients with advanced stages, high NLR (≥2) was found to have a negative prognostic impact on OS and PFS. In the multivariate Cox analysis, we confirmed that the NLR was an independent prognostic factor for both OS and PFS (P=.000). But the differences in OS or PFS by PLR were not found in MM patients. CONCLUSIONS: Our study suggests that NLR not PLR can be acted as an independent prognostic factor for analyzing the clinical outcome of MM patients.