Research Reveals the Role of Overall Health in Ovarian Cancer Prognosis

Before going further into the study, it’s important to take a minute and discuss what exactly PNI is. Overall health includes a whole host of different factors. From BMI measuring how much body fat a patient has to determining whether or not they get enough exercise, there are all kinds of different factors that make up an individual’s overall health. For the purpose of this study though, and for the sake of getting more precise results, the researchers used patients’ PNI scores. A PNI score is calculated by multiplying a patient’s serum albumin level + 0.005 by a patient’s lymphocyte count. If that sounds a bit complicated, that’s because it is, but using this precise data does allow researchers to come up with more precise results. In other less mathematical terms, researchers are looking at a patient’s blood. Serum albumin is another name for the most abundant protein in human blood plasma, and lymphocytes are essentially another name for white blood cells. So, researchers calculate PNI by plugging the density of the serum albumin protein in a patient’s blood and the white blood cell count in a patient into their formula. The resulting number is the patient’s PNI.