CRP and neutropenia: Figure 2A shows Jitter plot of propensity score distribution of individual cases. The absolute SDs of all the variables were lower than 0.1, indicating a well-balanced matching between the two groups (Figure 2B). The baseline characteristics before and after the propensity score matching are shown in Table 1. Patients with neutropenia were younger, had lower levels of initial neutrophils count, WBC count and CRP (P < 0.05).