Elevated Preoperative Platelet to Lymphocyte Ratio Associated with Decreased Survival of Women with Ovarian Clear Cell Carcinoma

This study was conducted to establish whether the preoperative platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR) ispredictive of survival of women with ovarian clear cell carcinoma (OCCC). A PLR > 300 was deemed elevated.Progression-free survival (PFS) was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Cox proportional hazard analysiswas used to determine the independent effect of PLR. Thirty-six patients were reviewed. Elevated PLRs weremore commonly noted in patients with an advanced vs an early stage of disease (88.9% vs 11.1%). Women withelevated PLR carried a higher rate of disease progression during primary therapy than that those in the normalPLR group (44.4 vs 22.2%). The median PFS for patients with elevated PLR was notably worse than that forpatients with normal PLR (10 vs 34 months). Despite the impact of elevated PLR on PFS, it was found to bemarginally significant when controlling for commonly applied prognostic markers. It, however, trended towardsignificance (HR=4.76; 95%CI, 0.95-23.8). In conclusion, an elevated PLR appears to be directly associated withadverse survival rather than being a surrogate for other indicators of a poor prognosis. PLR may be a usefulbiomarker for predicting survival of women with OCCC and merits further large-scale studies.