Active Treatments Prolong the Survival in Patients With Hepatocellular Carcinoma and Performance Status 3 or 4: A Propensity Score Analysis.

Goals And Backgrounds: Best supportive care is suggested as the standard treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with performance status (PS) 3-4 by the Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) system. To investigate the rationale of treatment allocation.

Study: A total of 2660 HCC patients were reviewed. One-to-one matched pairs between PS 3 and 4 patients receiving supportive care and anti-HCC treatments were generated by using the propensity score with matching model. The survival analysis was performed with the Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test. The hazard ratio was calculated with the Cox proportional hazards model.

Results: Among 328 patients with PS 3-4, 38% of patients received active anti-HCC treatments against the BCLC system. Compared with patients undergoing supportive care, patients receiving anti-HCC treatments more often had milder cirrhosis, smaller tumor burden, and lower serum α-fetoprotein levels (all P<0.05). Patients undergoing supportive care had significantly decreased survival (P<0.0001). With propensity scores, 101 pairs of similar HCC patients with PS 3-4 were selected from different treatment groups. They were comparable in age, sex, etiologies of liver disease, severity of cirrhosis, tumor burden, and prevalence of diabetes mellitus (all P>0.05) at baseline. In the matching model, patients with PS 3-4 undergoing supportive care had significantly shortened survival with an adjusted hazard ratio of 4.711 (confidence interval: 3.041-7.297, P<0.0001).

Conclusions: Over one-third of patients with PS 3-4 receive active anti-HCC treatments against the BCLC allocation algorithm in this study. Active anticancer therapies rather than best supportive care should be performed if there is no apparent contraindication.