2023 Volume 76 Issue 7 Pages 453-459
We investigated the prognostic impact of preoperative and postoperative Prognostic Nutritional Index (PNI) values in elderly patients with colorectal cancer undergoing postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy. Onodera's PNI was used as the nutritional index. Although preoperative PNI values reflected long-term prognosis as reported in previous studies (p = 0.008), we also found that PNI values at the time of induction of adjuvant chemotherapy and at the time of confirmed recurrence may also reflect long-term prognosis (p = 0.049). In addition, patients with preoperative low PNI who had recovered at the time of induction of adjuvant chemotherapy had a good prognosis, whereas those who remained in a low PNI state had a very poor prognosis (p = 0.008, hazard ratio: 3.56). The results of this study suggest that nutritional intervention not only in the perioperative period but also in the mid- to long-term postoperative period may improve the prognosis of elderly colorectal cancer patients by improving their nutritional status.
