Controlling nutritional status (CONUT), as an index to measure a patient’s nutritional condition, was found to be correlated with outcomes of various cancers. However, its prognostic role in breast cancer patients with curative resection remains unclear. Hence the present study was designed to determine the correlation between CONUT and prognosis in resected breast cancer patients.
A total of 861 breast cancer patients with surgical resection in West China Hospital of Sichuan University between 2007 and 2010 were included in the present study. CONUT was retrospectively evaluated for each patient, and its relationship with various clinicopathological factors and breast cancer prognosis were further evaluated.
When the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed, CONUT had a higher area under the ROC curve (AUC) for the prediction of 5-year disease free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) compared with the neutrophil lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and prognostic nutritional index (PNI). Besids, the optimal cutoff value for CONUT to predict the 5-year survival was 3. Moreover, high CONUT was significantly correlated with older age, lymph node involvement, advanced T-stage and surgery type. In the multivariate analysis, CONUT-high patients had significantly poorer DFS and OS, when compared with CONUT-low patients. In the subgroup analysis, high CONUT was still an independent prognostic factor for poor DFS and OS for all stages of breast cancer. In addition, these results continued to maintain its significance in the multivariable analysis for patients with luminal B tumors.
The preoperative CONUT is a simple and uesful marker for predicting long term outcomes in breast cancer patients after curative resection.
Qinghua Zhou.
Has not received any funding.
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.