Preoperative Prognostic Nutritional Index May Be a Strong Predictor of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Recurrence Following Liver Transplantation

Purpose: Malnutrition is a major risk factor of immune dysfunction and poor outcome in cancer patients. The prognostic nutritional index (PNI), which is established by serum albumin level and peripheral lymphocyte count, was shown to correlate with prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients following liver resection and non-surgical interventions. The aim of this study was to analyze the predictive value of preoperative PNI in liver transplantation (LT) patients with HCC.

Patients And Methods: A total of 123 HCC patients that underwent LT were included in the analysis. The prognostic impact of preoperatively assessed clinical factors including the PNI on post-LT outcome was analyzed by uni- and multivariate analysis.

Results: Post-transplant tumor recurrence rates were 5.1% in high-PNI (> 42) and 55.6% in low-PNI (≤ 42) patients ( < 0.001). Preoperative high-PNI could be identified as a significant and independent promoter of both recurrence-free survival (hazard ratio [HR] = 10.12, 95% CI: 3.40-30.10; < 0.001) and overall survival (HR = 1.69, 95% CI: 1.02-2.79; = 0.004) following LT. Apart from that low-PNI proved to be a significant and independent predictor of microvascular tumor invasion (OR = 7.71, 95% CI: 3.17-18.76; < 0.001). In contrast, no tumor morphology features including the Milan criteria revealed an independent prognostic value.

Conclusion: Our data indicate that preoperative PNI correlates with biological tumor aggressiveness and outcome following LT in HCC patients and may therefore be useful for refining oncologic risk stratification.