Predictive ability of prognostic nutritional index in surgically resected gastrointestinal stromal tumors: a propensity score matching analysis

Recent findings have shown that inflammation indices are associated with prognosis in various malignancies. However, the usefulness of inflammation indices including platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio and prognostic nutritional index for gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) remains controversial. We retrospectively reviewed 340 primary localized GIST patients who had received surgical resection between 2005 and 2015 to investigate the effect of platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio and prognostic nutritional index on prognosis. 206 patients were selected by propensity score matching to control selection biases. Kaplan-Meier analysis and the log rank test demonstrated that high prognostic nutritional index (≥43.9) was significantly correlated with better recurrence-free survival (RFS) (P