Clin Mol Hepatol.  2021 Jul;27(3):499-509. 10.3350/cmh.2020.0333.

Serum fibrosis index-based risk score predicts hepatocellular carcinoma in untreated patients with chronic hepatitis B

• Liang LY
• Lee HW
• Wong VWS
• Yip TCF
• Tse YK
• Hui VWK
• Lui GCY
• Chan HLY
• Wong GLH

• KMID: 2517633
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3350/cmh.2020.0333

Abstract

Background/Aims
Serum fibrosis scores comprised of common laboratory tests have high utility to assess severity of liver fibrosis. We aimed to derive and validate a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk score based on serum fibrosis scores to predict HCC in treatment-naïve chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients.
Methods
Fifteen thousand one hundred eighty-seven treatment-naïve adult CHB patients were identified to form the training cohort in this retrospective study. Individual fibrosis score was included to construct a new HCC prediction score. The score was externally validated in an independent treatment-naïve Korean CHB cohort.
Results
180/15,187 patients (1.2%) in training cohort and 47/4,286 patients (1.1%) in validation cohort developed HCC during a mean follow-up of 52 and 50 months, respectively. The newly developed HCC risk score, Liang score, is composed of gender, age, hepatitis B virus DNA, fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) index, and ranges from 0 to 22. Area under the time-dependent receiver operating characteristic curve of Liang score was 0.79 (95% confidence interval, 0.70–0.89). A cutoff value of nine provided an extremely high negative predictive value of 99.9% and high sensitivity of 90.0% at 5 years in the validation cohort. Patients with Liang score ≤9 had HCC incidence <0.2% per year in both training and validation cohorts, in whom HCC surveillance might be exempted.
Conclusion
A novel HCC risk score, Liang score, based on FIB-4 index, is applicable and accurate to identify treatment-naïve CHB patients with very low risk of HCC to be exempted from HCC surveillance.

Keyword

Hepatitis B, Chronic; Carcinoma, Hepatocellular; Fibrosis; Surveillance