Journal
HEPATOLOGY RESEARCH
Volume 42, Issue 9, Pages 887-894Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.1111/j.1872-034X.2012.01004.x
Keywords
hepatocellular carcinoma; Lens culinaris agglutinin-reactive fraction of a-fetoprotein; prognostic factor; recurrence
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Funding
- Research Support Foundation of The University of Tokushima
- TAIHO Pharmaceutical
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
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Aim: Lens culinaris agglutinin A-reactive fraction of a-fetoprotein (AFP-L3) status has been reported to be an independent prognostic factor in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In this study, we evaluated the clinical usefulness of measuring preoperative AFP-L3 to predict the recurrence and prognosis of HCC after curative hepatectomy. Methods: One hundred and forty-two HCC patients who underwent curative hepatectomy were examined for the correlation between preoperative tumor marker, including AFP, des-?-carboxy prothrombin (DCP) and AFP-L3, and clinicopathological variables. The prognostic factors of disease-free survival rates and overall survival rates were also determined using clinicopathological variables including these three tumor markers. Results: There were similar tendencies in the relationship between these three markers and malignant behaviors including lower grade tumor differentiation or vascular invasion. In multivariate analysis, increased AFP-L3 value (P = 0.019) was found to be an independent prognostic factor of disease-free survival after curative hepatectomy. In addition, elevated DCP (P = 0.013) and AFP-L3 values (P = 0.012) were found to be independent prognostic factors. Furthermore, the preoperative AFP-L3 value in the patients with early recurrence (within 1 year after hepatectomy) was significantly higher than that in those without early recurrence (26.9 +/- 19.5 % vs 14.2 +/- 19.8 %, P = 0.047). Conclusion: Preoperative AFP-L3 value was strongly correlated to disease-free and overall survival rate and the timing of recurrence, so it appears that it would be useful to predict the recurrence and prognosis of HCC after curative hepatectomy.
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