ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Neuro-Oncology and Neurosurgical Oncology
DIAGNOSTIC VALUE OF CELLULAR INFLAMMATORY MARKERS IN CNS TUMOR PATIENTS UNDERGOING GLUCOCORTICOID THERAPY
Provisionally accepted
Sofya Sklyar1
Darya Sitovskaya1
Natalia Dryagina1Aleksei Ulitin1Victor Olyushin1
Stephanie E Combs2Konstantin Samochernykh1
Maxim Shevtsov2*- 1Polenov Neurosurgical Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia
- 2Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
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
Introduction. While inflammation is recognized as a key driver of solid tumor progression, the diagnostic and pathophysiological relevance of cellular inflammatory biomarkers in central nervous system (CNS) neoplasms remains incompletely defined. Materials and Methods. Clinical and hematological data were analyzed from 44 patients with glioblastoma, 32 with brain metastases, and 33 patients with meningioma who underwent primary surgical treatment between 2024 and 2025. A control group of healthy age-matched volunteers (n = 20) was included for comparison. The diagnostic performance of cellular inflammatory markers was evaluated across tumor entities, with additional stratification according to glucocorticosteroid exposure. Results. Patients with intracerebral tumors exhibited higher neutrophil and monocyte counts, as well as elevated neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and pan-immune inflammation value (PIV), along with a lower lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR) compared to both the meningioma group and healthy volunteers (p<0.05). In glioblastoma patients, dexamethasone administration significantly affected neutrophil and monocyte counts, NLR and PIV (p<0.05). In the group with metastatic brain lesions, glucocorticoid therapy led to an increase in neutrophil count and NLR (p<0.05). The LMR level was not influenced by dexamethasone. Conclusion. For patients with glioblastoma, the LMR serves as a diagnostically significant inflammatory biomarker independent of glucocorticoid administration. In patients with metastatic brain lesions, the most significant diagnostic value was demonstrated by monocyte counts, PIV and LMR.
Keywords: Glioblastoma, immune response, lymphocyte-to-monocyte, Meningioma, metastatic CNS lesion, Neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, Pan-Immune-Inflammation Value
Received: 09 Dec 2025; Accepted: 03 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Sklyar, Sitovskaya, Dryagina, Ulitin, Olyushin, Combs, Samochernykh and Shevtsov. 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: Maxim Shevtsov
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.