Integration of albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) score into Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) system for hepatocellular carcinoma.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) grade is a recently reported, simpler, more objective, and evidence-based alternative to the Child-Pugh (CP) score for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). We aimed to study whether ALBI grade could substitute for CP score in Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) for HCC.

METHODS: An international multicentre cohort (n = 3696) was accrued to compare the prognostic performance of the CP-based and ALBI-based BCLC system, in terms of homogeneity, discriminatory ability, and monotonicity of gradients that were numerically reflected by homogeneity likelihood, linear trend chi-squares, and c-indices, respectively.

RESULTS: The ALBI grade performed as well as CP score when integrated into the BCLC staging system in terms of predicting clinical outcome of HCC regardless of regions, etiology, and treatment options. CP-based and ALBI-based BCLC systems were highly concordant with weighted kappa value of 0.917. All restaged patients showed significantly different clinical outcomes compared with their original stage classification. In particular, ALBI-based BCLC upstaged 83 (2.2%) patients from lower CP-based BC LC stages to ALBI-based BCLC stage D, whose median overall survival was only 3 months.

CONCLUSIONS: The overall prognostic performance of ALBI-based and CP-based BCLC systems was similar. It also potentially allows more precise patient selection for clinical trials on systemic agents.