Prognostic Significance of Albumin-Globulin Score in Patients with Operable Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer

This study was designed to evaluate the prognostic value of the preoperative albumin-globulin score (AGS) in the patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after pulmonary lobectomy.

The optimal cutoff level was 40.00 and 27.05 g/L for Alb and Glb, respectively. Based on this and the previous study, patients with both an hypoalbuminemia (< 40.00 g/L) and an elevated Glb level (≥ 27.05 g/L) were assigned a score of 2, and patients with one or neither were assigned a score of 1 or 0, respectively. We investigated the correlations between the AGS and the clinicopathological characteristics of patients and found that AGS was significantly associated with TNM stage (P = 0.016). Multivariate Cox analyses indicated that the AGS was an independent prognostic indicator for NSCLC for disease-free survival (DFS) (P = 0.001) and overall survival (OS) (P = 0.004). Kaplan-Meier analysis and log-rank test demonstrated that there were significant differences in DFS (P < 0.001) and OS (P < 0.001) among the three AGS groups. Furthermore, our study showed that DFS and OS are significantly different in three groups of patients with different AGS, in both Squamous carcinoma (P < 0.001 for DFS; P < 0.001 for OS) or adenocarcinoma (P = 0.034 for DFS; P = 0.035 for OS). In addition, we enrolled 53 patients as an independent set of cases for the further validation of AGS. Multivariate analyses verified AGS was an independent prognostic factor for NSCLC patients (P = 0.020 for DFS; P = 0.018 for OS).

Preoperative AGS is an independent prognostic factor for patients with operable NSCLC.