The effect of pretreatment BMI on the prognosis and serum immune cells in advanced LSCC patients who received ICI therapy

This study aims to evaluate the prognosis and serum immune cells of patients with different pretreatment body mass index (BMI) values. The data of 61 newly diagnosed patients with advanced lung squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) who received immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) combined with chemotherapy were obtained from the database of Rizhao People's Hospital (Rizhao, Shandong). According to the cutoff value of BMI (23.2 kg/m²), 32 patients had a high BMI and the remaining 29 patients had a low BMI. The effects of different BMIs on the prognosis and serum immune cells of patients were analyzed. The median progression-free survival (PFS) times were 7.72 months in the high BMI group and 4.83 months in the low BMI group [adjusted hazard ratio (HR), 0.23; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.11-0.48; P < .001]. In terms of the overall survival (OS), the median times of the high BMI group and low BMI group were 18.10 and 13.90 months, respectively (adjusted HR, 0.15; 95% CI, 0.07-0.32; P < .001). After 4 cycles of ICI therapy combined with chemotherapy, the objective response rate was 59.4% for the high BMI group and 20.7% for the low BMI group (P = .002). In addition, the number of serum immune cells in patients with high BMI was significantly higher than that in patients with low BMI (all P < .001). There was a linear relationship between BMI value and the number of serum immune cells (all R²> 0.7). The current results showed that high BMI is associated with better prognosis in LSCC patients who received ICIs, which may be related to higher levels of serum immune cells.