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

Xiao-Fu Chen ^1* Zhi-Ming Huang ^2* Xie-Lin Huang ^2*

• ¹ Center for General Practice Medicine, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital, Hangzhou, China
• ² First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China

Introduction: Our study's objective 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: 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 was 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 in active stage significantly increased when the FAR was ≥ the optimal cut-off values.The FAR, a simple prognostic indicator, performs well in identifying active IBD.