Prediction models of hepatocellular carcinoma development in chronic hepatitis B patients

Abstract

Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a major cause of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Applying the same strategies for antiviral therapy and HCC surveillance to all chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients would be a burden worldwide. To properly manage CHB patients, it is necessary to identify and classify the risk for HCC development in such patients. Several HCC risk scores based on risk factors such as cirrhosis, age, male gender, and high viral load have been used, and have negative predictive values of ≥ 95%. Most of these have been derived from, and internally validated in, treatment-naïve Asian CHB patients. Herein, we summarized various HCC prediction models, including IPM (Individual Prediction Model), CU-HCC (Chinese University-HCC), GAG-HCC (Guide with Age, Gender, HBV DNA, Core Promoter Mutations and Cirrhosis-HCC), NGM-HCC (Nomogram-HCC), REACH-B (Risk Estimation for Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Chronic Hepatitis B), and Page-B score. To develop a noninvasive test of liver fibrosis, we also introduced a new scoring system that uses liver stiffness values from transient elastography, including an LSM (Liver Stiffness Measurement)-based model, LSM-HCC, and mREACH-B (modified REACH-B).