The transition in the etiologies of hepatocellular carcinoma-complicated liver cirrhosis in a nationwide survey of Japan
Japan Etiology of Liver Cirrhosis Study Group in the 54th Annual Meeting of JSH, Hirayuki Enomoto, Yoshiyuki Ueno, Yoichi Hiasa, Hiroki Nishikawa, Shuhei Hige, Yasuhiro Takikawa, Makiko Taniai, Toru Ishikawa, Kohichiroh Yasui, Akinobu Takaki, Koichi Takaguchi, Akio Ido, Masayuki Kurosaki, Tatsuya Kanto, Shuhei Nishiguchi
Abstract
BACKGROUND: We recently reported the real-world changes in the etiologies of liver cirrhosis (LC) based on nationwide survey data and assessed the etiologies of LC with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). METHODS: Fifty-five participants from 68 institutions provided data on 23,637 patients with HCC-complicated LC. The changing trends in etiologies were assessed. We further analyzed the data from 29 hospitals that provided the annual number of newly identified HCC-complicated LC patients from 2008 to 2016 (N = 9362) without any missing years and assessed the transition in the real number of newly identified HCC-complicated LC cases. RESULTS: In the overall cohort, hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection (60.3%) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection (12.9%) were the leading and third-most common causes of HCC-complicated LC in Japan, respectively. HCV infection was found to be the leading cause throughout Japan. The rate of viral hepatitis-related HCC decreased from 85.3 to 64.4%. Among non-viral etiologies, notable increases were observed in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH)-related HCC (from 1.5 to 7.2%) and alcoholic liver disease (ALD)-related HCC (from 8.5 to 18.6%). Regarding the real number of newly diagnosed patients, the number of patients with viral hepatitis-related HCC decreased, while the number of patients with non-viral HCC, particularly NASH-related HCC, increased. CONCLUSIONS: Viral hepatitis has remained the main cause of HCC in Japan. However, the decrease in viral hepatitis-related HCC, particularly HCV-related HCC highly contributed to the etiological changes. In addition, the increased incidence of non-viral HCC, particularly NASH-related HCC, was involved in the changing etiologies of HCC-complicated LC in Japan.