BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Immunol.
Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1645874
This article is part of the Research TopicCommunity Series in Novel Biomarkers in Tumor Immunity and Immunotherapy: Volume IIIView all articles
Serum creatinine to cystatin C ratio is a prognostic indicator in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma receiving neoadjuvant immunochemotherapy
Provisionally accepted
- Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Background: This study aimed to explore the relationship between pretreatment serum creatinine to cystatin C ratio (CCR) and prognosis in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) receiving neoadjuvant immunochemotherapy (NICT). Methods: Two hundred and two ESCC patients who received NICT were included in the current retrospective study. The restricted cubic spline displayed the non-linear relationship between prognosis and CCR. The association between overall survival (OS)/disease-free survival (DFS) and CCR was also investigated. Kaplan-Meier methods and Cox proportional hazard regression analyses were employed. Results: The connection between DFS/OS and CCR suggested that their interaction was non-linear. The restricted cubic spline (RCS) model identified 97.5 as the ideal cutoff point for CCR and divided it into 2 groups. Patients exhibiting low CCR demonstrated significantly worse 3-year DFS (48.5% vs. 74.3%, P<0.001) and OS (62.9% vs. 82.9%, P=0.001) compared to those with high CCR. The results indicated that CCR had prognostic significance for the ESCC cases stratified according to subgroup analyses. Compared to the low CCR group, subsequent multivariate analysis revealed that the high CCR group reduced the risk of recurrence by 56.0% (P=0.001) and the risk of death by 51.8% (P=0.013), respectively. Conclusion: The therapeutic efficacy of NICT for ESCC can be predicted by pretreatment CCR. Although the CCR may not have attained a very high quality, it still holds certain significance for clinical practice in ESCC patients undergoing NICT.
Keywords: esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, Creatinine to cystatin C ratio, neoadjuvantimmunochemotherapy, Disease-Free Survival, overall survival
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 03 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Feng, Wang, Yang and Chen. 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:
Ji-Feng Feng, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China
Qi-Xun Chen, Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.