Abstract:
Background
Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a progressive loss of kidney function with ongoing systemic
inflammation that can be independently predicted by inflammatory markers like Platelet-
Lymphocyte ratio (PLR), and proteinuria.
Objectives
The present study aimed to find the correlation between PLR with proteinuria in different stages
of CKD patients.
Methods
After getting informed consent, blood and urine samples were collected from 85 randomly
selected CKD patients and classified into stages 2 to 4 based on their estimated glomerular
filtration rate (e-GFR) values. PLR was determined by values obtained from platelet count, white
blood cell count, and differential white blood cell count. Proteinuria was determined using the
urine protein creatinine ratio (UPCR) obtained from the measurement of urine protein and
creatinine. Statistical analyses were performed using the statistical package for the social
sciences version 16, and the p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results
Amongst the 85 participants, males were predominant (58.8%), with a mean age of 58. Severity
analysis based on the e-GFR revealed that 17.64%, 18.82%, 29.41%, and 34.11% of patients
were in stages 2, 3A, 3B, and 4, respectively. Bivariate correlation analysis indicates a
significant positive correlation (r = 0.787, p < 0.0001). Furthermore, stage-wise correlation
2
analysis done by Spearman's rank correlation demonstrated that PLR had a statistically
significant strong positive correlation with UPCR in stage IIIA (r=0.854, p< 0.001), IIIB
(r=0.800, p<0.001) and IV (r=0.661, p< 0.001) albeit it showed a statistically insignificant
negative correlation in stage II (r=-0.479, P=0.071).
Conclusions
The findings indicated that PLR has a strong positive correlation with proteinuria in stage IIIA,
IIIB, and IV of CKD; therefore, it could be used as a novel predictive marker for identifying the
severity of CKD. However, further large-scale studies need to be performed to find the genetic
and demographic variations.
