ABSTRACT
Objective: To analyze clinical features and prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (cHCC) patients after liver resection, so as to clarify the prognostic risk factors. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the data of patients who underwent mesohepatectomy for cHCC at Tianjin Medical University Cancer Hospital and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Cancer Hospital between October 2006 and December 2014. The patients were assigned into three subgroups according to disease-free survival (DFS): high risk (DFS≤1 year), middle risk (1 year<DFS≤3 years), and low risk (DFS>3 years). Clinicopathological characteristics were compared and prognostic factors were evaluated using univariate and multivariate analyses. Results: In total, 173 patients were reviewed. The median overall survival (OS) in the high-risk group was 13.5 months compared with 24.0 months in the middle-risk group and 45.5 months in the low-risk group. Univariate analysis showed that liver capsule invasion (P=0.022), tumors adjacent to major vascular vessels (<1 cm) (P<0.01), HCC size>50 mm (P=0.012), presence of microvascular invasion (P<0.001), tumor invasive growth (P<0.001), and preoperative transarterial chemoembolization (TACE; P=0.028) were significant risk factors for recurrence. The main risk factors for OS were male gender (P=0.013), alpha-fetoprotein >200 ng/mL (P=0.005), tumor size >50 mm (P=0.013), adjacent to major vascular vessels (P<0.001), high Edmondson-Steiner differentiation grade (P=0.003), preoperative TACE (P=0.010), and tumor invasive growth (P=0.001). Cox multivariate analysis demonstrated that tumors adjacent (<1 cm) to major vascular trunks and tumor invasive growth were inde-pendent prognostic factors for both DFS and OS. In total, 40.5% patients in the high-risk group had both risk factors; this percentage was 13.4% in the middle-risk group and 3.1% in the low-risk group (P=0.001). A prognostic model including the above 9 factors were created based on Logistic regression to predict the percentage of patients belonging to the high-risk group. The results showed that the prediction accuracy continued to increase with the number of more factors added. When all the 9 factors were included, the pre-dictive percentage was 82.1%. Conclusions: cHCC patients in the high-risk group had more risk factors than those in the middle-and low-risk groups. A prognostic model containing these factors may provide accurate prediction of survival or risk stratification, and cHCC patients with these risk factors should be candidates for aggressive following-up and adjuvant therapy.
ABSTRACT
Many patients with hilar cholangiocarcinoma (HC) have a poor prognosis. Snail, a transcription factor and E-cadherin repressor, is a novel prognostic factor in many cancers. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between snail and E-cadherin protein expression and the prognostic significance of snail expression in HC. We examined the protein expression of snail and E-cadherin in HC tissues from 47 patients (22 males and 25 females, mean age 61.2 years) using immunohistochemistry and RT-PCR. Proliferation rate was also evaluated in the same cases by the MIB1 index. High, low and negative snail protein expression was recorded in 18 (38%), 17 (36%), and 12 (26%) cases, respectively, and 40.4% (19/47) cases showed reduced E-cadherin protein expression in HC samples. No significant correlation was found between snail and E-cadherin protein expression levels (P = 0.056). No significant correlation was found between snail protein expression levels and gender, age, tumor grade, vascular or perineural invasion, nodal metastasis and invasion, or proliferative index. Cancer samples with positive snail protein expression were associated with poor survival compared with the negative expresser groups. Kaplan-Meier curves comparing different snail protein expression levels to survival showed highly significant separation (P < 0.0001, log-rank test). With multivariate analysis, only snail protein expression among all parameters was found to influence survival (P = 0.0003). We suggest that snail expression levels can predict poor survival regardless of pathological features and tumor proliferation. Immunohistochemical detection of snail protein expression levels in routine sections may provide the first biological prognostic marker.