Usefulness of Glucose to Lymphocyte Ratio to Predict in-Hospital Mortality in Patients with AECOPD Admitted to the Intensive Care Unit

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between glucose to lymphocyte ratio (GLR) and the outcome of acute exacerbation chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU). This study included 3573 patients from the eICU Collaborative Research Database (eICU-CRD) and 926 AECOPD patients admitted to ICU from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care-IV (MIMIC-IV) database. The optimal cutoff value for GLR was 5.6. Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated that patients in lower GLR (< 5.6) group showed a better overall survival than patients in higher GLR (≥ 5.6) group in all sets. Multivariate Cox regression analysis demonstrated that age, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score, SpO2, albumin and GLR are independent predictors of poor overall survival in the training cohort and were incorporated into the nomogram for in-hospital mortality as independent factors. The nomogram exhibited excellent discrimination with C-indexes in training cohort, internal validation and external validation cohort were (0.801, 95%CI: 0.769-0.863), (0.805, 95%CI: 0.759-0.851) and (0.811, 95%CI: 0.772-0.850), respectively. The calibration plot indicated an adequate fit of the nomogram for predicting the risk of in-hospital mortality in all sets. Moreover, the ROC analyses demonstrated that the discrimination abilities of GLR were better than other blood-based inflammatory biomarkers. As an easily available biomarker, GLR can independently predict the in-hospital mortality in AECOPD patients admitted to ICU. The nomogram combining GLR with other significant indicators exhibited excellence predictive performance for in-hospital mortality.