Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer and Hong Kong Liver Cancer staging systems for prediction of survival among Hepatocellular Carcinoma patients.

INTRODUCTION We aimed to compare the Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) and Hong Kong Liver Cancer (HKLC) staging systems. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a retrospective study on patients with newly diagnosed hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) at the University Malaya Medical Centre between 2011 and 2014. Survival times were analysed using the Kaplan- Meier procedure and comparison between groups was done using the log rank test. RESULTS The data of 190 patients was analysed. Chronic hepatitis B was the most common aetiology for HCC (43.7%), but a large proportion was cryptogenic or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis-related (41.6%). Only 11.1% were diagnosed early (BCLC Stage 0-A) while majority were diagnosed at an intermediate stage (BCLC Stage B, 53.7%). The median survival rate was significantly different between the different groups when either of the staging systems was used (p<0.05 for all comparisons). However, the two staging systems lacked agreement (weighted kappa 0.519, 95%CI: 0.449, 0.589) with significant difference in median survival rates between BCLC Stage A and HKLC Stage 2, and between BCLC Stage C and HKLC Stage 4. CONCLUSION Both staging systems were able to stratify patients according to survival, but they only had moderate agreement with significant differences observed in two groups of the staging systems.