Role of red cell dstribution width in colorectal cancer diagnosis and prognosis

Abstract

Objective: We aimed to assess whether red cell distribution width (RDW) was associated with pre-operative clinical features or post-operative clinicopathological outcomes in patients with colorectal cancer (CRC), and to determine the utility of RDW as a diagnostic or prognostic marker of CRC. Material and Method: This retrospective cohort study was conducted between January 2018 and May 2021 at a university hospital in Turkey. A total of 188 patients histologically diagnosed with CRC who had undergone surgery were included in the study. Results: Our study included 118 (62.77%) male patients, and the mean age of the patients was 66.28±11.71 years. We found that RDW values were significantly higher in females compared to males (p=0.033), in patients with T3 or T4 tumors compared to those with T1 or T2 tumors (p<0.001), in patients with stage 2 and stage 3 tumors compared to stage 1 patients, those with early mortality (p=0.012), in patients with right or transverse colon tumors compared to those with descending colon or sigmoid colon or rectum tumors (p<0.001), and those that died during follow-up compared to survivors (p=0.001). Additionally, age (r=0.233, p<0.001), tumor size (r=0.229, p=0.002) and length of stay in hospital (r=0.167, p=0.022) were positively correlated with RDW values. RDW had 75.7% sensitivity and 67.5% specificity to predict mortality for the cut-off point of 15.7 (AUC: 0.704, 95.0%CI: 0.615-0.793, p<0.001). Conclusion: These results show that RDW has a potential function as a biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of CRC.

Keywords

• Colorectal cancer
• RDW
• prognosis
• progression
• overall survival

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