There is no correlation between the α-FP level and the stages of the cancer.
One of these patients had normal α-FP level and suspected recurrence in the caudate lobe.
In the multivariate analysis, α-FP level and the Okuda stage persisted as independent variables.
In multivariate analysis, absence of underlying cirrhosis, α-FP level and Okuda stage were revealed as independent prognostic factors affecting survival (Table 5).
Furthermore, we evaluated the effect of TLR2 and TLR9 SNPs for α-FP level and UICC pathologic stage in patients with HCC (see Table 4) and found that no SNP had any influence on these two factors.
The tumour response was assessed using the serum α-FP level and the sum of longest diameter of the target lesions measured at baseline, 3 and 12 months according to the RECIST criteria (Duffaud and Therasse, 2000).
Another explanation could be a selection bias because we only assessed the tumour characteristics by α-FP level and the Okuda stage without evaluation of tumour morphology, vascular invasion and the existence of distant metastasis.
Groups were comparable with respect to age, gender, presence of cirrhosis, Child Pugh score, aetiology of hepatopathy, Okuda classification, KPS, α-FP level and size of target lesion (Table 1).
A stratified Cox proportional hazard regression model was used for multivariate analysis, using age, gender, treatment by octreotide LAR, presence of cirrhosis, Child Pugh stage, α-FP level and Okuda stage as covariates, to determine independent prognostics factors possibly affecting survival.
The differences at the practice level are somewhat larger than the FP level before and after correcting for covariates.
