Background: Triglyceride to high density lipoprotein cholesterol ratio (TG/HDL-c) is crucial when researching metabolic and vascular diseases, and its involvement in COVID-19 was sparsely elaborated on. The purpose of the study was to explore the inflammatory associations between the TG/HDL-c ratio and COVID-19 prognosis.
Methods: A total of 262 COVID-19 patients consisting of 244 survivors and 18 non-survivors were retrospectively investigated. The clinical features and baseline hematological parameters were recorded and analyzed. The receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was used to explore the role of TG/HDL-c in predicting the mortality of COVID-19, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients were used to measure the correlation between TG/HDL-c and inflammatory indicators, and the Kaplan–Meier (KM) curve was used to estimate the survival of COVID-19 patients with high and low TG/HDL-c ratio. Logistic regression analyses were performed to investigate the role of TG/HDL-c ratio on mortality of COVID-19 with no underlying diseases.
Results: Compared with the survivors, the non-survivors of COVID-19 had significantly higher levels of white blood cells (4.7 vs 13.0 × 10⁹/L; P < 0.001), neutrophils (3.0 vs 11.6 × 10⁹/L; P < 0.001), C-reactive proteins (15.7 vs 76.7 mg/L; P < 0.001) and TG/HDL-c ratio (1.4 vs 2.5; P = 0.001). The ROC curve [area under the curve (AUC), 0.731; 95% confidence interval (CI ), 0.609– 0.853; P = 0.001] suggested that the TG/HDL-c ratio could predict the mortality of COVID-19. The TG/HDL-c ratio was positively correlated with white blood cells (r = 0.255, P < 0.001), neutrophils (r = 0.243, P < 0.001) and C-reactive proteins (r = 0.170, P < 0.006). Patients with high TG/HDL-c ratio showed a worse survival compared with those with low TG/HDL-c ratio (Log rank P = 0.003). Moreover, TG/HDL-c ratio was an independent factor in predicting the mortality of COVID-19 patients with no underlying diseases.
Conclusion: Our study demonstrated that TG/HDL-c ratio might potentially be a predictive marker for mortality in COVID-19 patients.
Keywords: COVID-19, triglyceride, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, inflammation, viral infection, triglyceride-to-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol ratio, mortality