Prognostic performance of preoperative systemic inflammatory biomarkers in upper tract urothelial carcinoma after radical nephroureterectomy: a systematic review and meta-analysis of NLR, MLR, PLR, SII and SIRI

Description

Wang and colleagues pooled in 2026 the evidence on blood inflammation markers for predicting outcomes in upper tract urothelial carcinoma, a cancer of the kidney's urine channel and ureter. Patients face surgery that removes the kidney and ureter, and sorting who will fare badly is hard. The team gathered twelve studies covering 7,346 patients and five markers, all simple ratios or indices built from routine blood counts taken before surgery.

Wang found higher levels of every marker went with worse survival overall. The strongest pooled link for overall survival came from the systemic inflammation response index, which roughly doubled the risk of death. The neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio showed a similar near-doubling with tight agreement between studies. Cancer-specific and freedom-from-return results pointed the same way. The authors warn the markers were pooled separately, with differing cut-offs, so no ranking between them is justified yet.

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Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13461713