Predictive role of neutrophil-lymphocyte and platelet-lymphocyte ratios in thyroid nodules with cytological diagnosis of “undetermined significance” and “suspicious for malignancy”

Abstract:

Objective: To evaluate the predictive role of complete blood count (CBC) parameters in thyroid cytological diagnosis in patients with the diagnosis of undetermined significance (AUS) and suspicious for malignancy (SM) in hematological inflammatory parameters.
Methods: The preoperative CBC of 127 patients who underwent total thyroidectomy were retrospectively evaluated. While 52 patients were defined as AUS (Group 1), 75 patients were defined as SM (Group 2) in thyroid fine-needle aspiration cytology. Both groups were divided into benign and malignant sub-groups according to histopathological diagnosis of thyroidectomy specimens. In each group, the preoperative hematologic parameters (leukocyte, neutrophil, lymphocyte, platelet, neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio ‘NLR’, platelet/lymphocyte ratio, ‘PLR’) were compared with respect to malignancy, tumor size, stage and multicentericity of cancer.
Results: The statistical analysis showed that there was no significant difference in comparison of hematological parameters in benign and malignant groups.
Conclusion: Our study showed that there was no role of NLR and PLR in the cytological diagnosis of AUS and SM to predict malignancy. There was also no correlation of hematological parameters to tumor size, multicentricity, and central lymph node metastasis.