Prognosis evaluation in alpha-fetoprotein negative hepatocellular carcinoma after hepatectomy: Comparison of five staging systems

A preliminary study of plasma cyclase-associated protein 2 as a novel biomarker for early stage and alpha-fetoprotein negative hepatocellular carcinoma patients

“…Interestingly, these factors are also relevant predictive factors of the tumor progression [27]. One report also indicate that BCLC stage B-C is a risk factors leading to worse overall survival of AFP-negative HCC patients, and the possibility of tumor recurrence is increased when tumor size is larger than 3 cm in diameter [28]. Therefore, these findings reveal that the levels of CAP2 may predict the HCC disease prognosis.…”

Is Serum Alpha-Fetoprotein Useful for Predicting Recurrence and Mortality Specific to Hepatocellular Carcinoma After Hepatectomy? A Test Based on Propensity Scores and Competing Risks Analysis

“…In addition, high levels of serum AFP were not correlated with poorer clinical endpoints in terms of recurrence and HCC-related death even in patients with initial elevation of AFP, in contrast to a large number of reports that have claimed a benefit of serum AFP measurement before surgical resection of HCC to easily and inexpensively predict long-term prognosis. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] These conclusions also followed from our analyses of recurrence and death specific to HCC using the best cutoffs of serum AFP at different time points based on the AUROC values, all of which were only about 0.5.…”

“…4 Elevated serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) level has also been frequently reported to indicate a worse postsurgical prognosis. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] On the other hand, in several other studies, serum AFP levels were not found to have value in predicting recurrence and death. [13][14][15] In the present study we compared recurrence and mortality endpoints following hepatectomy in HCC patients stratified according to initial level of AFP to test whether serum AFP is useful in predicting long-term prognosis.…”

Analysis of DNA Methylation in Plasma for Monitoring Hepatocarcinogenesis

“…Nowadays, serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and ultrasonography (US) are clinically adopted for HCC screening (Masuzaki et al, 2012;Zhu et al, 2013). Nevertheless, serum AFP in about 40% of patients always remains at a low level ( < 400 ng/mL) (Farinati et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2010), and US also has limitations in further detection of the features of liver nodules (Ward and Robinson, 2002).…”