Pretreatment Immature Platelet Fraction as a Surrogate of Reticulated Platelets Predicts the Response to Corticosteroids in Adults with Immune Thrombocytopenia

OBJECTIVES: Reticulated platelets circulating in the blood reflect megakaryopoietic activity and platelet turnover and can be automatically and low-invasively measured as the immature platelet fraction (IPF) using a Sysmex XN hematocytometer. The present study retrospectively investigated whether or not the IPF can predict the treatment response to corticosteroids in adult patients with primary immune thrombocytopenia (ITP). METHODS: Forty-six patients who had been newly diagnosed with primary treatment-naïve ITP and started treatment with corticosteroids were analyzed. RESULTS: Among the 46 primary ITP patients, 33 (72%) responded to the treatment and 13 (28%) did not. The percentage of IPF (IPF%) among the nonresponders was significantly lower than that of the responders (6.6 vs. 16.0%; p < 0.001). In the receiver operating characteristics analysis, the optimum IPF% cut-off value for predicting the treatment response was 12%, with a specificity of 85% and a sensitivity of 76%. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings thus suggest that measuring the IPF% as a surrogate of reticulated platelets is useful to identify patients likely to respond to corticosteroids.