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BY-NC-ND 3.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access February 3, 2012

Neutrophil to lymphocyte count ratio as a biomarker of bacterial infections

  • Michal Holub EMAIL logo , Ondřej Beran , Nikola Kaspříková and Pavel Chalupa
From the journal Open Medicine

Abstract

The implementation of new markers of bacterial infection into clinical practice is hindered by their costs. We assessed the potential use of the neutrophil to lymphocyte count ratio (NLCR) to discriminate between bacterial and viral infections. NLCR was evaluated in 45 patients with bacterial infections: 24 patients with viral infections and 18 healthy adults. The medians of NLCR were 11.73 in bacterial infections, 2.86 in viral infections and 1.86 in controls. The NLCR cut-off value of 6.2 exhibited a sensitivity value of 0.91 and a specificity value of 0.96 for bacterial infection. These results suggest a diagnostic potential for NLCR.

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Published Online: 2012-2-3
Published in Print: 2012-4-1

© 2012 Versita Warsaw

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

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