Fibrinogen-to-albumin ratio: a new biomarker to identify inflammatory bowel disease in active stage.

INTRODUCTION

The objective of our study was to externally validate the value of the fibrinogen-to-albumin ratio (FAR), a new biomarker used to identify active inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

MATERIALS AND

METHODS

A total of 245 ulcerative colitis (UC) and 543 Crohn's disease (CD) patients were included in our study. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to investigate the independent association between FAR and disease activity in patients with UC or CD. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was used to assess the prediction accuracy of biomarkers in distinguishing disease states.

RESULTS

Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified the FAR as the strongest predictor to discriminate disease activity of UC (odds ratio: 24.871, 95% confidence interval: 9.831-38.912, p < 0.001) and CD (odds ratio: 28.966, 95% confidence interval: 21.009-37.250, p < 0.001). The FAR gave the highest area under the curve in identifying both active UC (0.870, 95% confidence interval: 0.824-0.916) and CD (0.925, 95% confidence interval: 0.904-0.946). The probability of both UC and CD patients being in the active stage significantly increased when the FAR was more than or equal to the optimal cutoff values.

CONCLUSION

The FAR, a simple prognostic indicator, performs well in identifying active IBD.