Predictive Value of Pretreatment Haematological Markers in Cervical Cancer at a Third Level Health Institution

Background: Inflammatory biomarker measurement is a low-cost method of identifying patients with advanced disease, and the risk of recurrence after treatment.

Objectives: To investigate if the pretreatment neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) can be used in predicting the stage of cervical cancer.

Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional analysis of seventy-eight women newly diagnosed with cervical cancer managed at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2022. A data collection form was used to collect socio-demographic and clinical characteristics from the patients after informed consent was obtained. Blood samples were collected and used to determine the pretreatment levels of NLR and PLR. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve was used to assess the predictive accuracy of the different haematological parameters for late-stage cervical cancer.

Results: PLR was significantly higher in advanced-stage cancer (p = 0.041). There was no statistically significant strong positive correlation between NLR (r = 0.195) and PLR (0.078) with cervical cancer staging (p > 0.05). None of the haematological parameters could be used as predictive markers for advanced-stage cervical cancer.

Conclusion: Pretreatment NLR and PLR did not predict the stage of cervical cancer in this study.