The association between systemic inflammation markers and the risk of incident dilated cardiomyopathy: a prospective study of 351,148 participants.

Background: The role of systemic inflammation in the development and progression of cardiovascular diseases has been attractive, but its association with incident dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is rarely investigated. This study aimed to systematically investigate the association between various inflammatory markers and DCM incidence.

Methods: The data were derived from the UK Biobank database. Systemic inflammation markers in this study encompassed peripheral immune cell counts and their ratios and the low-grade inflammation score (INFLA-score). The Cox proportional hazards regression, restricted cubic splines model, and segmented regression were adopted to assess the association between systemic inflammation markers and DCM incidence. Additionally, the subgroup Cox analysis stratified across sex was also performed.

Results: A total of 351,148 participants were enrolled in this study, and 377 subjects developed DCM during a mean follow-up of 12.21 years. The positive association between C-reactive protein (CRP), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and CRP-to-lymphocyte ratio (CLR) and DCM incident risk was found (CRP: HR = 1.190, P = 0.001; NLR: HR = 1.315, P = 0.033; CLR: HR = 1.206, P < 0.001), while the lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR) was negatively associated with DCM incident risk (HR = 0.756; P = 0.033). Furthermore, the increased risk of DCM incidence was significantly and nonlinearly correlated with the reduction of platelet count (HR = 0.543; P = 0.002). In the subgroup analysis, sex-specific inflammation markers related to DCM development were noticed.

Conclusions: The study has underlined that multiple inflammation markers were significantly associated with the risk of incident DCM, which would provide evidence for the aetiological study of DCM.