ALBI versus Child‐Pugh grading systems for liver function in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

BACKGROUND: The prognostic performance of the albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) grade in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as an objective method of assessing liver function was investigated. METHODS: Data from 2099 patients with HCC in Korea were collected and analyzed retrospectively. The discriminative performance of ALBI grade was compared with Child-Pugh (C-P) grade for different stages or treatments. RESULTS: The median follow up duration was 16.2 months (range: 1.0-124.9). The median survival times were 49.7 months for C-P grade A (65.8%), 12.4 months for C-P grade B (25.5%), and 4.2 months for C-P grade C (8.6%) (P < 0.001). The median survival times were 84.2 months for ALBI grade 1 (32.8%), 25.5 months for ALBI grade 2 (53.5%), and 7.7 months for ALBI grade 3 (13.7%) (P < 0.001). In early UICC stages, ALBI grade showed better discriminative performance than C-P grade. In curative treatments, ALBI grade also showed better discriminative performance than C-P grade (Harrell's C: 0.624 (C-P grade) vs 0.667 [ALBI grade]). CONCLUSIONS: ALBI grade provided better prognostic performance in survival analysis and better distribution of the grades than C-P grade in HCC, suggesting that ALBI grade could be a good alternative grading system for liver function in patients with HCC.