TNF and infection: The main limitations are the retrospective nature of the study, which made it difficult to exclude other major factors that could have influenced fibrinogen levels and platelet indices, such as diabetes, smoking, infections, inflammatory diseases, iron deficiency and the use of antiplatelet drugs [40,41,42] and the lack of other inflammatory markers such as CRP (C-reactive protein), TNF-α (tumor necrosis factor-α), interleukin-6.