Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Feb 27, 2018; 10(2): 308-318
Published online Feb 27, 2018. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v10.i2.308
Survival outcomes of liver transplantation for hepatocellular carcinoma in patients with normal, high and very high preoperative alpha-fetoprotein levels
Wong Hoi She, Albert Chi Yan Chan, Tan To Cheung, Chung Mau Lo, Kenneth Siu Ho Chok
Wong Hoi She, Department of Surgery, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Albert Chi Yan Chan, Tan To Cheung, Chung Mau Lo, Kenneth Siu Ho Chok, Department of Surgery and State Key Laboratory for Liver Research, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Author contributions: She WH contributed to study conception and design, data acquisition, analysis, interpretation and manuscript drafting; Chan ACY, Cheung TT and Lo CM contributed to critical revision of the manuscript; Chok KSH contributed to study conception and design, drafting and revision of the manuscript; all authors approved the submitted version of the paper.
Institutional review board statement: Institutional review board approval was not required for this retrospective study since treatments given to patients were not influenced by the study and the clinical data used in the study are anonymous.
Informed consent statement: Patients’ consent to this retrospective study was not required since treatments given to patients were not influenced by the study and no individual patients would be identified as the clinical data used in the study are anonymous.
Conflict-of-interest statement: None of the authors has any conflict of interest.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Kenneth Siu Ho Chok, FRCS (Ed), Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, University of Hong Kong, 102 Pok Fu Lam Road, Hong Kong, China. chok6275@hku.hk
Telephone: +852-22553025 Fax: +852-28165284
Received: November 23, 2017
Peer-review started: November 24, 2017
First decision: December 12, 2017
Revised: December 18, 2017
Accepted: February 5, 2018
Article in press: February 5, 2018
Published online: February 27, 2018
Core Tip

Core tip: Various established criteria have been used to identify patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who would benefit from liver transplant with reasonable survival. Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) level has been identified as an important factor associated with suboptimal survival with high recurrence rate. This study demonstrated that AFP level correlated well with the pathological findings of tumor differentiation and microvascular invasion, which are usually confirmed in explant pathology. In this set of data, AFP level of 54 ng/mL was associated with disease recurrence, and AFP level of 105 ng/mL was found to be the cut-off value for overall survival difference.