Association and predictive performance of platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio and maternal serum ferritin level for preterm birth: A prospective cohort study

Description

Sofie D Wahyudi and five colleagues followed pregnant women in 2026 to test whether two routine blood measures can warn of early delivery. Inflammation in the mother is increasingly blamed for preterm birth, and both the platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio and ferritin, an iron storage protein that also rises with inflammation, are cheap to obtain. Women carrying single babies were recruited between twenty-eight and nearly thirty-seven weeks and followed until they delivered.

Both measures ran with risk. Women whose ratio crossed the study threshold carried nearly four times the adjusted odds of preterm birth. Those above the ferritin threshold carried about four and a half times the odds. Yet as screening tests the pair discriminated only modestly, barely better than chance in accuracy terms. The authors read the results as support for inflammation's role, and as a caution that association alone does not make a useful predictor.

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Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13558872