Zeitschrift für Nephrologie und Therapeutik

Increased Neutrophil to Lymphocyte Ratio (NLR) is a Sign of Disease Activity in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Patients with Renal Involvement

Abstract

Nurhan Bilen, Erdem Cankaya, Yusuf Bilen, Abdullah Uyanik and Fuat Erdem

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an idiopathic multi-systemic autoimmune disease that covers a wide array of clinical and laboratory findings. Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is a simple onsite available recently emerged inflammatory marker which is evaluated in different inflammatory conditions such as infection, athero-embolic disease, malignancies and autoimmune disease. In this study we aimed to investigate any relation between disease activity and NLR of the SLE patients with renal involvement. In this study we retrospectively analyzed hematological and laboratory parameters of SLE patients with renal involvement during both in active disease and in remission period. We investigated 36 SLE patients with renal involvement in their active and remission period of the disease. Mean proteinuria and serum albumin level of the patients at active disease period were 5.26 ± 2.92 gr/day, 2.58 ± 0.71 gr/dl in orderly. Mean proteinuria and serum albumin level of the patients at remission period after cessation of intensive immunosuppression were 0.77 ± 1.59 gr/day, 4.08 ± 0.58 gr/dl inorderly. Mean NLR at active disease period of the patients was statistically significantly detected higher than at remission period (6.11 ± 5.89, 2.65 ± 1.53, p=0.00). We detected that SLE patients with renal involvement has a high NLR during disease activation and statistically significantly lower NLR at remission period. We offer to investigate NLR as a disease activity marker for SLE patients with renal involvement via prospective randomized large scaled studies.