Pretreatment neutrophil‐lymphocyte ratio predicts the long‐term survival of patients with sinonasal malignancy

Sinonasal cancers are rare diseases, accounting for 0.2% to 0.8% of all malignant neoplasms. Despite advances in surgical and adjuvant therapy, the 5-year overall survival (OS) rate of all patients with sinonasal cancers remains approximately 50%. Other than tumor necrosis metastasis (TNM) stage, however, there are few prognostic indicators of survival in patients with these rare and aggressive tumors. Prognostic indicators are needed to clinically evaluate the prognosis of all patients with sinonasal cancers, as well as those with specific histologic subtypes. Recent studies have reported that a high pretreatment blood neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is an inflammatory marker predictive of prognosis in patients with various types of cancers, including cancers of the head and neck region. The NLR is considered relatively convenient to assess, because blood tests are less invasive and less time-consuming. The present study was performed to determine an appropriate NLR cutoff value specific to each subtype of sinonasal cancer, and to analyze the impact of NLR on prognosis in patients with each pathologic subtype. 2 PATIENTS ANDMETHODS