Background: The purpose of this study was to determine the prognostic significance of clinical factors and staging systems for survival of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients who are candidates for therapeutic clinical trials.
Methods: From December 1990 to July 2005, 236 patients with unresectable HCC were enrolled into six published phase II trials assessing various therapeutic regimens. Of these, 156 chemotherapy-naive patients with Child-Pugh class A and Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer stage C disease were included in this analysis. Twenty-seven relevant clinical characteristics were analyzed to identify prognostic factors of survival. Beyond these prognosticators, the predictive ability of eight staging systems (the tumor-node-metastasis, Okuda, Cancer of the Liver Italian Program [CLIP], Chinese University Prognostic Index, Japanese Integrated Staging, Tokyo, National Taiwan University Risk Estimation, and Advanced Liver Cancer Prognostic System [ALCPS] score) were compared using the Akaike information criteria.
Results: The median overall survival time was 129 days (95% confidence interval, 111-147 days). Significant predictors of a shorter overall survival time were an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status score ≥2, the presence of symptoms, ascites, an aspartate transaminase level more than two times the upper limit of normal, and regional lymph node involvement. The ALCPS and CLIP scores were superior to the other systems for predicting survival.
Conclusions: The prognosis of patients with advanced HCC who are candidates for therapeutic clinical trials is affected by several factors related to the patient, liver function, and the tumor. The ALCPS and CLIP scores appear to be superior to the other systems for predicting survival.