Objective: To explore the prognostic value of preoperative fibrinogen to albumin ratio (FAR) in patients with glioblastoma (GBM) and its association with clinical characteristics.
Patients and Methods: A retrospective analysis was carried out on patients with newly diagnosed GBM who had undergone operation at the Department of Neurosurgery at West China Hospital between June 1st 2015 to June 31st 2018. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were performed to determine the optimal cut-off values for fibrinogen, albumin, neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and FAR by calculating the maximum Youden index. Kaplan–Meier curves and Cox regression analyses were applied to evaluate the prognostic value of FAR in GBM. Harrell concordance index (C-index) and Akaike information criterion (AIC) were calculated to compare different prognostic models.
Results: A total of 206 GBM patients were included in this research. The optimal cut-off value for fibrinogen, albumin, NLR, and FAR were 2.57, 42.4, 2.28, and 0.068 respectively. High FAR was significantly related to older age, KPS≤ 80, IDH-1 wildtype, presence of preoperative seizures, higher NLR, and tumor location. In Cox regression analyses, high FAR was significantly associated with poor prognosis. Prognostic models including FAR had the largest C-index and lowest AIC.
Conclusion: FAR was determined to be an independent risk factor of prognosis in patients with newly-diagnosed GBM. And the prognostic predictive ability of FAR is stronger than fibrinogen and albumin.
Keywords: fibrinogen to albumin ratio, FAR, fibrinogen, albumin, glioblastoma, prognosis