Risk of recurrence in hepatitis B-related hepatocellular carcinoma: Impact of viral load in late recurrence☆
Article Outline
Abbreviations: HCC, hepatocellular carcinoma, HBV, hepatitis B virus
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly prevalent and lethal cancer type being the third leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide [1]. More than 80% of cases occur in developing countries particularly in Eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa mainly due to chronic infection with hepatitis B virus (HBV) [1], [2]. Hence, HBV is the most common cause of HCC in the world. Although population-based universal infant vaccination is shown to be effective in preventing new neonatal HBV infection and related HCC [3], there are still over 350 million individuals with chronic infection, and the prevalence reaches 10–20% of the population in the endemic areas. Once chronic infection is established, complete eradication of the virus is still not possible, and these patients are facing the risk of HCC development [4].
HCC usually develops on a background of chronic liver damage, i.e., sustained hepatic inflammation, regeneration, and fibrogenesis, owing to hepatitis virus infection, alcohol abuse, metabolic disorders, or exposure to environmental carcinogens [2]. In fact, cirrhosis is observed in 80% of HCC patients. These risk factors are thought to indirectly promote HCC development by generating a carcinogenic microenvironment in the liver, known as the “field effect”, which is assumed to cause accumulated genetic hits inducing cellular transformation [2].
However, in contrast to hepatitis C and other risk factors, it is known that HBV-related HCC is less associated with the presence of cirrhosis, and this trend becomes more obvious in younger patients whose duration of infection is not long enough to develop full-blown cirrhosis [1], [2], [5]. This observation has prompted the suggestion that HBV itself has direct carcinogenic potential, and studies have shown that HBV might directly activate oncogenic signaling: cis-activation through integration of viral genetic material into host cellular genomic DNA and trans-activation by viral products such as HBx protein [2], [5], [6], [7]. Other lines of evidence suggest that increased risk of HCC is associated with certain HBV genotypes, e.g., genotype C in Asian population [8], [9] and genotype F in the Alaskan population [10]. In addition, precore and basal core promoter mutations in the HBV genome have been reported as risk factors of HCC development [9], [11], [12], [13]. These findings suggest that there is a certain variation in the carcinogenic potential according to the viral strains.
Consistent with the hypothesis of direct carcinogenic effect of HBV, accumulating evidence has shown that a high serum HBV DNA level, indicative of increased viral replication, is a risk factor for de novo HCC development in HBV carriers irrespective of hepatitis activity [14], [15], [16]. In addition, a recent study suggested that prolonged suppression of HBV replication with nucleoside or nucleotide analogs may reduce the risk of HBV-related HCC development [17], suggesting that antiviral treatment is a promising strategy to prevent hepatocarcinogenesis.
Localized HCC tumors can be subjected to potentially curative treatments such as surgical resection and percutaneous ablation. However, even after such radical therapies, more than 70% of patients have recurrence at 5 years, which still limits survival of the patients [1]. It is known that there are two distinct types of HCC recurrence: tumors grown from dissemination of the primary tumor and de novo tumors arising from the “field effect” in diseased liver [1], [18], [19], [20]. That is, the latter is clonally independent from the primary tumor. Discrimination of these types of recurrence is clinically important because the biological basis producing each recurrence is different and the following therapeutic intervention should be considered accordingly [21]. However, it is difficult to examine the clonal difference from a practical point of view in the clinical setting because of the lack of reliable and clinically applicable markers.
Imamura et al. proposed a convenient framework to clinically differentiate each type of recurrence as “early” or “late” recurrence based on a cut-off of 2 years after surgery [22]. This framework has made it possible to assess risk factors for each type of recurrence [18], [23]. Early recurrence, which appears within 2 years after surgery, is associated with tumor-related factors including the presence of vascular invasion and additional tumor sites besides the primary lesion (satellite lesion), which is consistent with the notion that this type of recurrence is tumor dissemination as a consequence of malignant characteristic of the primary tumor. On the other hand, late recurrence, which appears more than 2 years after surgery, is considered to be associated with the severity of hepatic inflammation and liver damage closely linked to the “field effect”.
With the successful implementation of HCC surveillance programs, increasing number of HCC tumors are diagnosed at an early stage, where the tumor has less likelihood of dissemination and thus removed more effectively without residual tumor cells [24]. This means that more patients avoid the risk of early recurrence and thus survive longer enough to acquire late recurrence. This shift of recurrence pattern highlights increasing necessity to focus on late recurrence, which cannot be treated with early detection and resection of the primary tumor.
In theory, late recurrence is assumed to arise from the same biology associated with the initial HCC development in cirrhosis [19], and thus in HBV-related HCC, both of the direct carcinogenic effect of HBV and the “field effect” are assumed to be responsible for late recurrence. Recently, Kim et al. reported that persistent viremia is associated with disease-free survival after 12 months of surgery, suggesting its association with late recurrence [25]. In this issue of the Journal, Wu et al. evaluated clinical variables together with HBV-related factors including viral load, genotype, and recurrent mutations, for their prognostic implication with respect to early and late recurrence in 193 HBV-related HCC patients [26]. During the median follow-up of 5 years, 134 patients (69%) had HCC recurrence, which is comparable to the figures in the literature [18]. Consistent with the notion of the pattern of HCC recurrence, the study clearly showed that tumor-related factors (microvascular invasion, positive cut margin, and high serum AFP level) were associated with the risk of early recurrence, whereas liver inflammation/damage-related factors (histological inflammation and ICG-15 retention rate) were independently associated with the risk of late recurrence [26]. Of note, high HBV viral load was found to be associated with the risk of late, but not early, recurrence. The frequency of genotype C in HCC patients was higher compared to HBV carriers and correlated with high HBV viral load and more severe histological inflammation, consistent with previous observations [8], [9]. The recurrent mutations were also correlated with genotype C to some extent. However, the viral load was the only significant variable independently associated with late recurrence, probably because the high HBV DNA level is the most functional measure reflecting the exposure to the direct carcinogenic effect of HBV. In the multivariate analysis, tumor multinodularity appeared to be associated with both early and late recurrences, which assumingly indicates the presence of satellite tumors due to the dissemination as well as the “field effect”-related multicentric metachronous tumors.
In conclusion, these findings confirmed that late recurrence mostly corresponds to de novo carcinogenesis associated with HBV viremia as well as the “field effect” in HBV-related HCC. This may support prioritized use of anti-HBV treatment as adjuvant therapy after the resection or ablation of HCC for the patients with a high HBV DNA level to prevent late recurrence. This scenario may prompt the design of more powered clinical trials compared to the setting of chemoprevention targeting cirrhosis to prevent initial HCC development, given that the incidence rate of recurrence is higher than that of initial HCC development [27]. Furthermore, investigation of the molecular mechanism of the direct carcinogenic effect of HBV may help clarify additional therapeutic targets in terms of HCC prevention. Currently available evidence, mostly obtained from PCR-based assays with limited scale, have identified a handful of the genomic integrations potentially affecting function of genes, e.g., cyclin A and telomerase reverse transcriptase, in a sporadic manner [6], [7]. Recently emerging genomics technology like high-throughput sequencing [28], [29] may provide a more comprehensive view of critical recurrent oncogenic integration events. Combination of the new sequencing assay with chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP-Seq) [30], may help to identify oncogenic transactivation by HBV proteins to obtain complementary information of the direct carcinogenic effect caused by HBV.
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☆ The author declared that he does not have anything to disclose regarding funding from industries or conflict of interest with respect to this manuscript.
PII: S0168-8278(09)00536-4
doi:10.1016/j.jhep.2009.08.003
© 2009 European Association for the Study of the Liver. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Refers to article:
- Risk factors for early and late recurrence in hepatitis B-related hepatocellular carcinoma , 23 July 2009
