A Novel Inflammatory-Nutritional Prognostic Scoring System for Patients with Early-Stage Breast Cancer

We attempted to explore the prognostic value of baseline inflammatory and nutritional biomarkers at diagnosis in patients with early-stage breast cancer and develop a novel scoring system, the inflammatory-nutritional prognostic score (INPS).

We collected clinicopathological and baseline laboratory data of 1259 patients with early-stage breast cancer between December 2010 and November 2012 from Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center. Eligible patients were randomly divided into training and validation cohorts (n = 883 and 376, respectively) in a 7:3 ratio. We selected the most valuable biomarkers to develop INPS by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) Cox regression model. A prognostic nomogram incorporating INPS and other independent clinicopathological factors was developed based on the stepwise multivariate Cox regression method. Then, we used the concordance index (C-index), calibration plot, and time-dependent receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to evaluate the prognostic performance and predictive accuracy of the predictive nomogram.

Four inflammatory-nutritional biomarkers, including neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), monocyte-lymphocyte ratio (MLR), prognostic nutritional index (PNI), and albumin-alkaline phosphatase ratio (AAPR), were selected using the LASSO Cox analysis to construct INPS, which remained an independent prognostic indicator per the multivariate Cox regression analysis. Patients were stratified into low- and high-INPS groups based on the cutoff INPS determined by the maximally selected rank statistics. The prognostic model for overall survival consisting of INPS and other independent clinicopathological indicators showed excellent discrimination with C-indexes of 0.825 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.786-0.864) and 0.740 (95% CI: 0.657-0.822) in the training and validation cohorts, respectively. The time-dependent ROC curves showed a higher predictive accuracy of our prognostic nomogram than that of traditional tumor-node-metastasis staging.

Baseline INPS is an independent indicator of OS in patients with early-stage breast cancer. The INPS-based prognostic nomogram could be used as a practical tool for individualized prognostic predictions.