The relationship between NLR/PLR/LMR levels and survival prognosis in patients with non-small cell lung carcinoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors.

BACKGROUND: The relationship between neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR), and lymphocyte to monocyte ratio (LMR) and the dire prognosis of non-small cell lung carcinoma patients who received immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are not known yet. METHODS: We screened the articles that meet the criteria from the database. The relationship between NLR/PLR/LMR levels and the survival and prognosis of non-small cell lung cancer patients treated with ICIs was analyzed. Summarize hazard ratio (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) to study progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). RESULTS: Thirty-four studies involving 3124 patients were enrolled in the final analysis. In short, high pre-treatment NLR was related to poor OS (HR = 2.13, 95% CI:1.74-2.61, P < .001, I2 = 83.3%, P < .001) and PFS (HR = 1.77, 95% CI:1.44-2.17, P < .001, I2 = 79.5%, P < .001). Simultaneously, high pre-treatment PLR was related to poor OS (HR = 1.49, 95% CI:1.17-1.91, P < .001, I2 = 57.6%, P = .003) and PFS (HR = 1.62, 95% CI:1.38-1.89, P < .001, I2 = 47.1%, P = .036). In all subgroup analysis, most subgroups showed that low LMR was related to poor OS (HR = 0.45, 95% CI: 0.34-0.59, P < .001) and PFS (HR = 0.60, 95% CI: 0.47-0.77, P < 0.001, I2 = 0.0%, P < .001). CONCLUSION: High pre-treatment NLR and pre-treatment PLR in non-small cell lung carcinoma patients treated with ICIs are associated with low survival rates. Low pre-treatment and post-treatment LMR are also related to unsatisfactory survival outcomes. However, the significance of post-treatment NLR and post-treatment PLR deserve further prospective research to prove.

Male and Female Subpopulations of Salix viminalis Present High Genetic Diversity and High Long-Term Migration Rates between Them.

Dioecy distributed in 157 flowering plant families and 959 flowering plant genera. Morphological and physiological differences between male and female plants have been studied extensively, but studies of sex-specific genetic diversity are relatively scarce in dioecious plants. In this study, 20 SSR loci were employed to examine the genetic variance of male subpopulations and female subpopulations in Salix viminalis. The results showed that all of the markers were polymorphic (Na = 14.15, He = 0.7566) and workable to reveal the genetic diversity of S. viminalis. No statistically significant difference was detected between male and female subpopulations, but the average genetic diversity of male subpopulations (Na = 7.12, He = 0.7071) and female subpopulations (Na = 7.31, He = 0.7226) were high. Under unfavorable environments (West Liao basin), the genetic diversity between male and female subpopulations was still not significantly different, but the genetic diversity of sexual subpopulations were lower. The differentiation of the ten subpopulations in S. viminalis was moderate (FST = 0.0858), which was conformed by AMOVA that most of genetic variance (94%) existed within subpopulations. Pairwise FST indicated no differentiation between sexual subpopulations, which was accompanied by high long-term migrate between them (M = 0.73~1.26). However, little recent migration was found between sexual subpopulations. Therefore, artificial crossing or/and transplantation by cutting propagation should be carried out so as to increase the migration during the process of ex situ conservation.