Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent evidence has shown that the complete blood count (CBC) is abnormal in patients with Crohn's disease (CD). We aimed to investigate an effective CBC parameter and explore its impact on disease activity in a large CD cohort. METHODS: We performed a retrospective analysis of patients with established CD who underwent clinically indicated endoscopy at four tertiary centres in China between 2016 and 2020. Individual variables of the Simple Endoscopic Score for CD, CBC parameters, C-reactive protein (CRP) levels, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and faecal calprotectin (FC) were independently reviewed by different investigators. The hold-out method was used to verify the predictive power of the established model. RESULTS: Data from a total of 1388 endoscopic procedures performed for 882 eligible CD patients were available with routine blood parameters and related indicators. The model using platelet-to-lymphocyte percentage ratio (PLpR) had high accuracy for identifying patients in endoscopic remission (ER), with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.785 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.784-0.787], which was comparable with that for CRP (AUC: 0.775, 95% CI: 0.774-0.777). Notably, the AUC of PLpR was significantly higher than that of CRP in patients with colonic disease and with a history of surgery. Moreover, after combining the FC with PLpR, the AUC value of FC + PLpR increased up to 0.892 (95% CI: 0.890-0.894) for identifying ER. CONCLUSIONS: We explored an index (PLpR) to identify CD patients in ER based on platelet and lymphocyte percentage from the CBC. PLpR helped evaluate the degree of disease activity and monitor the therapeutic response.