Multicenter prospective analysis of newly diagnosed hepatocellular carcinoma with respect to the percentage of Lens culinaris agglutinin‐reactive α‐fetoprotein¹

Abstract

Serum AFP concentration does not reveal a malignancy of HCC, however, the AFP-L3-positive HCC has biologically malignant characteristics, especially portal vein invasion and lower tumor classification, and is an advanced tumor regardless of small tumor size and lower serum AFP concentration. As AFP-L3 shows the tumor characteristics, its presence should be an important factor in the determination of therapy and prognosis of patients.

Prognostic Value of Serum AFP, AFP-L3, and GP73 in Monitoring Short-term Treatment Response and Recurrence of Hepatocellular Carcinoma after Radiofrequency Ablation

“…Many studies (Tangkijvanich et al, 2000;Fujioka et al, 2001;Carr et al, 2007;Yamamoto et al, 2010;Saito et al, 2012) revealed that AFP levels > 400 ng/mL were indicative of larger tumor size, greater tumor numbers, a later clinical phase, bile duct invasion, vascular invasion, and a shorter median survival time. Elevated AFP-L3 levels were associated with larger tumor size, a later clinical stage, vascular invasion, poor tumor differentiation, and distant metastasis (Oka et al, 2001;Yoshida et al, 2002;Carr et al, 2007;Saito et al, 2012). Other research studies (Riener et al, 2009;Hu et al, 2010) observed that GP-73 levels were significantly higher in patients with hepatitis C-derived HCC and a high tumor grade.…”

Diagnostic accuracy of tumor markers for hepatocellular carcinoma: a systematic review

“…Finally, 17 articles were included in our study (Fig. 1, Table 1) [68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84]. Eleven studies included data on more than one tumor marker [70, 71, 73-77, 79-81, 83], and 4 of them provided sensitivity and specificity of a combination of two tumor markers [70,74,77,79].…”

Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver consensus recommendations on hepatocellular carcinoma

“…Furthermore, the level of AFP is elevated in patients with both HCC and chronic liver disease; thus, there is wide overlapping between the two groups [144,145]. Most studies adopt a cutoff value of 20 ng/mL for AFP, with a sensitivity ranging from 49 to 71% and specificity from 49 to 86% in HCCs smaller than 5 cm [146][147][148][149][150][151][152][153][154]. Limitations in the sensitivity and specificity of AFP in surveillance of high-risk populations have led to the use of US as an additional method for the detection of HCC [142,[155][156][157].…”