Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Effectiveness of α-fetoprotein for hepatocellular carcinoma surveillance: the return of the living-dead?

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1586/egh.12.30

1747-4132

Edoardo G. Giannini, Virginia Erroi, Franco Trevisani,

Liver Disease and Transplantation

Evaluation of: Singal AG, Conjeevaram HS, Volk ML et al. Effectiveness of hepatocellular surveillance in patients with cirrhosis. Cancer Epidemiol. Biomarkers Prev. 21(5), 793–799 (2012).The evaluated article assesses the effectiveness in clinical practice of surveillance with ultrasound (US) and α-fetoprotein (AFP) in patients at risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma. After a median follow-up of 3.5 years, among the 442 enrolled patients with cirrhosis, 41 developed tumor (annual incidence, 2.8%). Twenty-three hepatocellular carcinomas were diagnosed at Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer early stage (single tumor <5 cm or ≤3 tumors each 20 ng/ml. Specificity was 91.5% for US and 90.5% for AFP. The combination of the tests increased the sensitivity to 90.2%, with a small decrease in specificity (83.3%). In a real-world setting, the combination of US and AFP would be the most effective for hepatocellular carcinoma surveillance.