Combination of Tertiary Lymphoid Structure and Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio Predicts Survival in Patients With Hepatocellular Carcinoma

作者：Shaodi Wen, Yuzhong Chen, Yuzhong Chen, Chupeng Hu, Xiaoyue Du, Jingwei Xia, Xin Wang, Wei Zhu, Qingbo Wang, Miaolin Zhu, Yun Chen, Yun Chen, Bo Shen · 发表于：Frontiers in Immunology · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3389/fimmu.2021.788640 · 被引用次数：49 · 研究领域：Inflammatory Biomarkers in Disease Prognosis、Ferroptosis and cancer prognosis、Atherosclerosis and Cardiovascular Diseases

Background Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common pathological type of primary liver cancer. The lack of prognosis indicators is one of the challenges in HCC. In this study, we investigated the combination of tertiary lymphoid structure (TLS) and several systemic inflammation parameters as a prognosis indicator for HCC. Materials and Methods We retrospectively recruited 126 postoperative patients with primary HCC. The paraffin section was collected for TLS density assessment. In addition, we collected the systemic inflammation parameters from peripheral blood samples. We evaluated the prognostic values of those parameters on overall survival (OS) using Kaplan-Meier curves, univariate and multivariate Cox regression. Last, we plotted a nomogram to predict the survival of HCC patients. Results We first found TLS density was positively correlated with HCC patients’ survival (HR=0.16, 95% CI: 0.06 − 0.39, p < 0.0001), but the power of TLS density for survival prediction was found to be limited (AUC=0.776, 95% CI:0.772 − 0.806). Thus, we further introduced several systemic inflammation parameters for survival analysis, we found neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) was positively associated with OS in univariate Cox regression analysis. However, the combination of TLS density and NLR better predicts patient’s survival (AUC=0.800, 95% CI: 0.698-0.902, p < 0.001) compared with using any single indicator alone. Last, we incorporated TLS density, NLR, and other...