Systematic Review of Immune Markers for Lung Cancer Brain Metastasis Risk

Fourteen retrospective cohort studies involving 3,643 lung cancer patients were analyzed. This meta-analysis by Mingfeng Liu, published in 2026, evaluates associations between neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio, lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio, and brain metastasis risk.

Use Cases

• Assess the association between elevated neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio and increased brain metastasis risk, especially in small cell lung cancer patients.
• Investigate the context-specific link between low lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio and metastasis risk in non-small cell lung cancer and synchronous brain metastasis subgroups.
• Validate the meta-analysis finding that platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio showed no significant association with brain metastasis risk in the overall patient pool.
• Replicate subgroup analyses for metachronous versus synchronous brain metastasis based on the reported odds ratios and confidence intervals.
• Use the pooled multivariate effect sizes to inform predictive models for identifying high-risk patients prior to treatment.

Strengths

• Analysis pools data from 14 independent cohort studies.
• Includes 3,643 total participants with lung cancer.
• Reports specific odds ratios and confidence intervals for three immune-inflammatory markers.
• Conducts subgroup analyses for lung cancer types and metastasis timing.

Limitations

• Dataset is a 17.6 MB document, not structured tabular data, limiting computational analysis.
• All included studies are retrospective, introducing potential biases inherent to observational data.
• Sample size for specific subgroups (e.g., SCLC) is not detailed, limiting granular assessment.

Provenance

Source

Systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by author Mingfeng Liu, sourced from figshare.

Collection Method

Literature search across PubMed, Cochrane, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Scopus; data extraction and analysis performed using Stata 15.0.

Time Range

Studies included up to November 2025.

Freshness

Literature search includes studies published up to November 2025; document last updated April 2026.