SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Endocrinol.
Sec. Clinical Diabetes
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fendo.2025.1564170
This article is part of the Research TopicHighlights in Diabetes NephropathyView all 17 articles
Diagnostic Accuracy of Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio in Type 2 Diabetic Nephropathy: A Meta-Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Jinan Third People's Hospital, Jinan, China
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Background: Diabetic nephropathy (DN) represents one of the most prevalent microvascular complications of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The pathogenesis of DN is significantly influenced by the inflammatory response. Thus, the current meta-analysis aimed to assess the diagnostic accuracy of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in early DN and DN. Methods: Cochrane, Pubmed, Embase, and Web of Science were retrieved from database establishment to August 31, 2024. The Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies 2 (QUADAS-2) was utilized to assess the quality of included studies. This meta-analysis was carried out via Stata16.0 and Revman 5.3 software. Results: Finally, this meta-analysis incorporated 18 studies, of which 5 were early DN studies, involving 232 patients with early DN, and 13 were DN studies, involving 4,818 patients with DN. The results indicated that the diagnostic sensitivity of NLR for early DN was 0.83 [95% CI: 0.60-0.94], the specificity was 0.76 [95% CI: 0.61-0.86], and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was 0.85 [95% CI: 0.81-0.88]. The diagnostic sensitivity of NLR for DN was 0.73 [95% CI: 0.67-0.79], the specificity was 0.70 [95% CI: 0.59-0.79], and the AUROC was 0.78 [95% CI: 0.74-0.81].Conclusions: NLR exhibited moderate performance in diagnosing both early DN and DN, and its diagnostic accuracy was higher in early DN than in DN. Due to the limitations of existing studies, further studies are required to verify the findings.
Keywords: diabetic nephropathy, Early diabetic nephropathy, Neutrophils/lymphocytes, Meta-analysis, Neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio
Received: 22 Jan 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Liu and Xiao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhenwen Xiao, Jinan Third People's Hospital, Jinan, China
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