Fibrinogen–Albumin Ratio Index (FARI) as a Certain Prognostic Biomarker in Pretreated Patients with Immunotherapy

Abstract

Purpose

Immunotherapy has become the standard treatment for advanced tumors so that many biomarkers play parts in predicting prognosis and clinical outcome. Use of FARI is increasing, but there are no studies on its use prior to immunotherapy.

Patients and Methods

A retrospective study prior to immunotherapies in advanced carcinoma used FARI and other biomarkers as clinical parameters from which to analyse data from January 2014 to November 2020. Data were presented in GraphPad Prism 7 and X-Tile and analyzed using IBM SPSS.

Results

A total of 146 patients were enrolled in our study. FARI (with an optimal cut-off value of 11.1%) was divided into a high group, in connection with shorter OS mainly in patients with bone metastasis (120m vs 11.5m, 95% Cl: 12.17–23.83, SE: 2.974, p=0.03), and a low group with a longer PFS (11.0m vs 5.0m, 95% Cl: 3.303–12.697, SE: 2.397, p=0.03) in NSCLC but a shorter PFS (3.5m vs 5.5m, 95% Cl: 3.757–6.243, SE: 0.634, p=0.01) in liver metastasis. FARI was not determined as an independent predictor of OS in patients undergoing medical therapies (>11.1% vs ≤11.1%, HR: 1.296, 95% Cl: 0.687–2.032, p=0.314). ECOG (HR: 2.892, 95% Cl: 1.911–4.378, p<0.001) can be an independent predictor for PFS and OS in advanced carcinoma.

Conclusion

Our findings highlight certain potential values for predicting prognosis but no outstanding biomarkers prior to immunotherapy according to FARI.

Keywords:

• fibrinogen–albumin ratio
• prognosis
• biomarker
• immunotherapy

Acknowledgments

Ethics approval was obtained and all participants in the study provided informed written consent. TThis study was supported by Peking University International Hospital Research Funds (No. YN2018QN09).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.