LAUSR

Crohn’s disease (CD) is an incurable inflammatory bowel disease that is characterized by mucosal inflammation and ulceration anywhere along the gastrointestinal tract. The pathology of CD includes inflammatory cell infiltration and excessive pro-inflammatory cytokine production [1]. Apart from C-reactive protein and erythrocyte sedimentation rate, a growing body of evidence suggests that the neutrophil-tolymphocyte and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratios (NLR and PLR, respectively) could be potential inflammatory biomarkers of systemic inflammation in chronic diseases [2]. However, the studies investigating this matter are sparse in CD. Therefore, we conducted a study to evaluate the potential roles of NLR and PLR as biomarkers for CD. This is an institutional review board approved observational case-control diagnostic study to evaluate the value of PLR and NLR as biomarkers for CD. Patients with endoscopically confirmed diagnoses of CD were included in this study and were ageand sex-matched to a control group of subjects with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptoms and normal endoscopy and mucosal biopsy. All subjects signed an informed consent form and had a complete blood count at diagnosis before the initiation of treatment. We calculated PLR and NLR by dividing the absolute counts of platelets and neutrophils by that of lymphocytes of the patients. The activity of CD was evaluated using the endoscopic index of the severity of CD [3]. We excluded patients with active infections, infections within the last month, and ongoing prednisone treatment. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS v.20.0 (IBM Corporation, New York, USA). Quantitative data were presented as means and standard deviations (mean ± SD). Univariate logistic regression models with either subject diagnosis (either CD or control)