A comparison of patients with hepatitis B- or hepatitis C-based advanced-stage hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer death and has characteristic causes, epidemiology and clinical features. The leading causes include hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), alcoholism, and aflatoxin B dietary exposure, as well as combinations of these factors. Few cancers offer the opportunity to study the clinical and cancer phenotype that results from different causes, quite like HCC. Advantage was taken of a large cohort of advanced, unresectable and untransplantable HCCs to compare the phenotypes resulting from HBV-based compared with HCV-based HCC. The main findings were that HBV-based HCC patients were statistically significantly younger, had a higher percent of males, had larger maximum tumor sizes, and had higher blood alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) and albumin levels and platelet counts than HCV-based HCC patients. These differences partly reflect an earlier age of HBV infection and a lesser degree of cirrhosis-associated liver damage, as a result of the different biological consequences of chronic HBV compared with chronic HCV infection.