There are a number of ways your mesothelioma doctor can predict whether that extrapleural pneumonectomy procedure you might be considering is going to be successful.
The problem is that your doctor cannot make such a prediction with 100 percent accuracy. But researchers from Canada and Japan have been jointly working to nudge the accuracy level higher.
They have been working on a new method of predicting extrapleural pneumonectomy outcomes. They say it has the potential to be a very useful addition to the prognosis toolkit.
The new method involves measuring the ratio of platelets to lymphocytes in a sample of your blood. According to the researchers, the ratio can be converted into a prognostic score.
The better the score, the better the outcome of your extrapleural pneumonectomy is likely to be. The researchers claim the scoring method is strikingly simple.
Platelets-to-Lymphocytes Blood Sample Ratio Possible Applications
The researchers wrote about it in a recent issue of The Journal of Thoracic Disease. They think it’s a winner, but believe more study should be done to see how mesothelioma doctors might best use it.
For example, is it only useful when predicting outcomes of extrapleural pneumonectomy, or could it also be used for prognoses involving other types of mesothelioma surgery?
Could it also be useful in terms of predicting outcomes of nonsurgical mesothelioma treatments, such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy?
The researchers say these answers would be very good to have.
Development of this new scoring system involved bringing together a group of 85 malignant pleural mesothelioma patients who had previously undergone an extrapleural pneumonectomy.
All of these extrapleural pneumonectomies occurred at Toronto General Hospital in Canada during a 10-year span.
Of those 85 patients, the researchers identified 65 with available pre-therapy blood test results. These results were retrospectively analyzed.
The researchers explained that the analysis of the patients’ blood samples included an effort to identify various hematologic parameters for survival and their cutoff values.
With all the data pieces in place, the researchers were able to formulate a prognostic scoring system. On paper, it looked pretty good. Of course, everything on paper always looks good.
Test Validated on Two Group of Patients
So the next step was to test out the scoring system on a different group of malignant pleural mesothelioma patients.
For that, they assembled another cohort of patients — 32 this time. All of them had undergone an extrapleural pneumonectomy at mesothelioma centers in Japan over a period of 13 years.
The results of this trial run were very encouraging. Based on the validation testing with those 32 patients, it appeared that the scoring system was indeed capable of predicting with reasonable accuracy the outcome of an extrapleural pneumonectomy.
However, as the researchers cautioned, more testing on larger cohorts will be necessary before the platelets-to-lymphocytes ratio scoring method can be proclaimed truly viable for routine clinical use.
The researchers are from the University of Toronto in Canada, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Kyushu University in Japan and the University of Tokyo.
The title of their article is “Clinical Role of a New Prognostic Score Using Platelet-To-Lymphocyte Ratio in Patients with Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma Undergoing Extrapleural Pneumonectomy.”
