Neutrophil-Lymphocyte Ratios in Dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration

ABSTRACT

Inflammation plays a role in the etiopathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). A retrospective case-control study was conducted to assess the significance of the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) as a systemic inflammatory indicator in dry AMD. Clinical diagnosis and complete blood count (CBC) results were extracted from medical records for patients with dry AMD and age/sex-matched controls. This study included 90 patients diagnosed with dry AMD and 270 controls without AMD. There were no significant differences in the CBC results between the cases and controls. Patients with dry AMD had a slightly higher mean NLR than controls; however, this increase was not significant (P = .13). In the NLR model, age and sex were significant factors affecting the NLR values in the dry AMD group (P = .03 and 0.01, respectively). The NLR alone cannot predict dry AMD. Therefore, exploring other routine laboratory measurements may shed light on early disease prediction and prevention.

KEYWORDS:

• Biomarker
• blindness
• dry AMD
• macula
• Saudi
• vision

Acknowledgments

This paper has been published previously as a preprint in Research Square Preprint (DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-965139/v2, October 2021, URL: https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-965139/v2/3e3ccb50-9a5c-4b98-8706-dfb2d30477c3.pdf?c=1639403060).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval and consent to participate

IRB approval was obtained from the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (#SP21J/083/03).

Data availability statement

Raw data available upon reasonable request.

Authors’ contributions

All authors were involved in the data collection, analysis, and manuscript preparation.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.