Introduction:

The aim of this study is to correlate the number of days of hospital stay with the neutrophil-lymphocyte index (NLI) as a biomarker in patients diagnosed with Ludwig's angina who were admitted to the emergency department.

Patients and methods:

A search was conducted in the hospital's medical records, where only those with a diagnosis of Ludwig's angina from June 2016 to June 2020 and that met the selection criteria were obtained. Afterwards, sociodemographic data, days of hospitalization, hematological parameters, and values of neutrophils and lymphocytes were collected for subsequent statistical analysis.

Results:

We obtained 21 patients (9 females and 12 males). The average age was 43.1 years (range: 27-70 years). The variable of days of hospitalization was transformed into: short hospital stay for patients who were hospitalized for 5 days or less, and long hospital stay for patients who were hospitalized for 6 days or more. For the NLI, a high index was considered for patients with an NLI ≥ 6 and a low index for patients with an NLI ≤ 5, taking into account the cut-off point with respect to previously conducted studies. We observed that patients with a high NLI had a long hospital stay and according to the results, we obtained statistical significance (p = 0.02).

Conclusions:

The NLI appears to be a good biomarker for predicting the number of days of hospital stay for patients with Ludwig's angina. However, more studies are needed to confirm our results.

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