Clinical significance of cell differentiation in hepatocellular carcinoma.

Background/Aims: Hepatocellular carcinoma is commonly found in Asian countries and prognosis still remains gunsatisfactory due to recurrence after surgical tumor resection. Methodology: We try to demonstrate the recurrence and survival time in 99 surgical patients grading by tumor cellular differentiation from surgical specimen. Results: The rates of well, moderate, and poor differentiation were encountered in 21 cases (21.2%), 61 cases (61.6%) and 17 ccase (17.7%), respectively, Small tumor ( 0.05). Vascular invasion was more frequent in the poor differentiation group (76.5%) than the well (23.8%) and moderate (60.7%) differentiation groups (P<0.05). We found 23.5% (4/17) and 35% (21/60) to be tumor free but the recurrence time was 6.5 and 14.1 months for the vascular invasion (-) and (+), respectively. The residual median survival times were 6.5 and 14 months after recurrence, respectively. The tumor recurrence rates were 52.7% (11/21), 52.4% (32/61), and 35.5% (6/17) and recurrence times were 11.7 11.9, and 4.5 months for the well, moderate and poor differentiation group respectively totally. The recurrence time of young age group (<39 years old) was shorter than the others and there was no patient of well differentiation less than 40 years old. The recurrence time was shorter in the poor differentiation group but there was no significant difference according to age group. The median survival times were 22.2, 22.9, and 9.5 months for each group, respectively. Conclusions: Differentiation of hepatocellular carcinoma cell had a clinical significance and was found to be positively correlated with the invasive proclivity. The median survival time was longer in both the well and moderate differentiation group, but not in the poor differentiation group. The clinical data revealed that the extended operations performed upon the patients with poor differentiation effected the recurrence time but not the survival time.