Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although previous studies have revealed the correlation between inflammatory markers and coronary heart disease (CHD), this study aims to explore the relationship between inflammatory markers and CHD in the male and female population, respectively. METHODS: This study includes participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2003 to 2018. Inflammatory markers included the following: systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR). Multivariate logistic regression was performed to investigate the correlation between these inflammatory markers and CHD. The trend test was employed to examine potential linear trend associations, and the restricted cubic splines (RCSs) were utilized to depict nonlinear relationships. RESULTS: The NHANES database including 40,177 participants was stratified into two cohorts: the CHD group (n = 1667) and the non-CHD group (n = 38,510). With further gender stratification, we found that LMR, PLR, and SII all exhibited negatively significant correlation with CHD in the male group, while LMR and NLR were meaningful factors in the female group. We also detected that LMR, PLR, and SII all have nonlinear relationship with CHD in the male group (p for nonlinear < 0.05), while PLR had nonlinear relationship with CHD in the female group (p for nonlinear < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Our study revealed that LMR, PLR, and SII are significantly negative correlative markers of CHD in males, while LMR and NLR are more accurate predictors of CHD in females.