CRP and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: Previous studies indicated that a high CRP/Alb ratio was associated with large tumor size, tumor depth, microvascular invasion, and lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer, colorectal cancer, and hepatocellular carcinoma (Ishizuka et al., 2016; Shibutani et al., 2016; Saito et al., 2018; Kinoshita et al., 2015).