Teja M, Garrido MI, Ocanto A, Couñago F. Prognostic impact of inflammatory and nutritional biomarkers in pancreatic cancer. World J Clin Oncol 2025; 16(1): 101191 [DOI: 10.5306/wjco.v16.i1.101191]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Macarena Teja, MD, Attending Doctor, Department of Radiation Oncology, GenesisCare-San Francisco de Asís University Hospital, C/Joaquín Costa 28, Madrid 28002, Spain. macarena.teja@genesiscare.es
Research Domain of This Article
Oncology
Article-Type of This Article
Editorial
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Clin Oncol. Jan 24, 2025; 16(1): 101191 Published online Jan 24, 2025. doi: 10.5306/wjco.v16.i1.101191
Prognostic impact of inflammatory and nutritional biomarkers in pancreatic cancer
Macarena Teja, María I Garrido, Abrahams Ocanto, Felipe Couñago
Macarena Teja, María I Garrido, Abrahams Ocanto, Felipe Couñago, Department of Radiation Oncology, GenesisCare-San Francisco de Asís University Hospital, Madrid 28002, Spain
Macarena Teja, María I Garrido, Abrahams Ocanto, Felipe Couñago, Department of Radiation Oncology, GenesisCare-Vithas La Milagrosa University Hospital, Madrid 28010, Spain
Felipe Couñago, National Director, GenesisCare Spain, Madrid 28043, Spain
Felipe Couñago, Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Health and Sport, European University of Madrid, Madrid 28670, Spain
Author contributions: Teja M contributed to the discussion and design of the manuscript; Teja M, Garrido MI, Ocanto A and Couñago F contributed to writing and editing the manuscript, review of the literature, and designed the overall concept and outline of the manuscript; All authors contributed to this paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Macarena Teja, MD, Attending Doctor, Department of Radiation Oncology, GenesisCare-San Francisco de Asís University Hospital, C/Joaquín Costa 28, Madrid 28002, Spain. macarena.teja@genesiscare.es
Received: September 6, 2024 Revised: September 28, 2024 Accepted: October 10, 2024 Published online: January 24, 2025 Processing time: 53 Days and 18.4 Hours
Abstract
Pancreatic cancer is usually associated with a poor prognosis. Surgery is the main curative treatment but pancreatic operations are aggressive and new tools that help clinicians to predict surgical and prognostic outcomes are necessary. Lu et al recently published a retrospective, single centre cohort study evaluating the impact of seven nutritional and inflammatory markers in pancreatic cancer surgical patients: The albumin-to-globulin ratio, prognostic nutritional index (PNI), systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), nutritional risk index, and the geriatric nutritional risk index. A significant correlation was found between the PNI, SII, NLR, and PLR and a hospital discharge of less than 15 days. In a univariable analysis, PNI, SII, NLR and PLR were significantly related to recurrence-free survival and, in a multivariable analysis PNI was associated with overall survival. Various meta-analyses corroborate the results in terms of prognosis but individual studies are discordant on their usefulness. Besides, the cut-off values for these markers vary significantly between studies and there are no clinical trials comparing them to identify the most relevant ones. These are limitations when implementing nutritional and inflammatory biomarkers into clinical practice and further studies are needed in order to answer these questions.
Core Tip: Nutritional and inflammatory biomarkers are showing promising results in terms of prognosis in oncologic patients. In surgical pancreatic cancer patients, a relationship between some of these markers, post-operative outcomes, relapse-free survival and overall survival have been proven in a recent cohort study. However, there is a lack of standardization of the cut-off values of these biomarkers and there are no comparative trials that determine which marker is the gold standard for pancreatic cancer patients. For these reasons more evidence is needed to introduce them into clinical practice.
