Prognostic Roles of Inflammatory Markers in Pancreatic Cancer: Comparison between the Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio and Platelet-to-Lymphocyte Ratio

Table 2

Estimated rates of high neutrophil-to-lymphocyte and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratios.

	Number of subset	Fixed effect (95% CI)	Heterogeneity test ( value)	Random effect (95% CI)	Egger’s test ( value)
NLR
Overall	29	0.422 (0.409, 0.436)	<0.001	0.379 (0.310, 0.454)	0.086
Location
Asia	22	0.426 (0.411, 0.442)	<0.001	0.370 (0.285, 0.464)	0.067
Non-Asia	7	0.413 (0.388, 0.438)	<0.001	0.406 (0.295, 0.528)	0.855
Tumor stage
I and II	1	0.656 (0.587, 0.720)	1.000	0.656 (0.587, 0.720)	—
III and IV	14	0.406 (0.384, 0.428)	<0.001	0.373 (0.273, 0.484)	0.375
Treatment
Surgery	1	0.701 (0.653, 0.745)	1.000	0.701 (0.653, 0.745)	—
Chemotherapy	10	0.426 (0.401, 0.451)	<0.001	0.403 (0.276, 0.544)	0.571
Chemo- and radiotherapy	2	0.399 (0.325, 0.478)	<0.001	0.258 (0.045, 0.721)	—
Mixed	15	0.401 (0.385, 0.418)	<0.001	0.380 (0.294, 0.474)	0.359
NLR criteria
High (>4)	14	0.246 (0.230, 0.263)	<0.001	0.237 (0.184, 0.299)	0.650
Low (≤4)	15	0.530 (0.514, 0.547)	<0.001	0.533 (0.459, 0.606)	0.932
PLR
Overall	13	0.482 (0.464, 0.500)	<0.001	0.490 (0.438, 0.543)	0.523
Location
Asia	11	0.476 (0.457, 0.495)	<0.001	0.480 (0.422, 0.539)	0.751
Non-Asia	2	0.533 (0.480, 0.586)	0.047	0.545 (0.435, 0.651)	—
Tumor stage
III and IV	6	0.552 (0.522, 0.582)	0.028	0.542 (0.492, 0.592)	0.209
Treatment
Chemotherapy	3	0.569 (0.530, 0.607)	0.042	0.552 (0.478, 0.624)	0.096
Chemo- and radiotherapy	2	0.555 (0.483, 0.625)	0.061	0.540 (0.400, 0.674)	—
Mixed	7	0.444 (0.422, 0.466)	<0.001	0.448 (0.387, 0.510)	0.739
PLR criteria
High (>150)	4	0.404 (0.373, 0.435)	<0.001	0.435 (0.321, 0.556)	0.148
Low (≤150)	9	0.518 (0.497, 0.540)	0.006	0.519 (0.482, 0.557)	0.976

NLR: neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio; PLR: platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio; CI: confidence interval. “Mixed” treatment indicates surgery plus chemotherapy/radiotherapy.