Trends of liver cancer and its major risk factors in Korea

The Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea) is one of the countries with high incidence of liver cancer and there is great difference in incidence of liver cancer between male and female. We investigated the sex-specific trends of three major risk factors of liver cancer, which are hepatitis B virus(HBV) infection, hepatitis C virus(HCV) infection, and alcoholic liver cirrhosis. The incidence of liver cancer was obtained from the Cancer Registration Statistics of the National Cancer Center of Korea. Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) seropositivity was based on data from the 2011 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Disease statistics from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service of Korea were used to evaluate trends in HCV infection and alcoholic liver cirrhosis. The prevalence of these risk factors were compared with the incidence of liver cancer. Males had a three to four times higher incidence of liver cancer than females did from 1999 to 2011. This gap between the incidence for males and females increased with age and males aged 50 to 59 showed a five times higher incidence than females of the same age did. In general, HBsAg seropositivity decreased from 1998 to 2011. The prevalence of HCV infections was 96.2 and 90.3 per 100,000 females and males, respectively in 2013. The prevalences of HCV infections from 2009 to 2013 did not substantially differ. The annual average prevalence of alcoholic liver cirrhosis from 2009 to 2013 was 77.22 and 8.90 per 100,000 males and females, respectively; the prevalence among males was 8.7 times higher than that among females. The prevalence rapidly increased with age in males, and males aged 60 to 69 peaked with a 19.2 times higher prevalence than that among females of the same age group. We found that the incidence of alcoholic liver cirrhosis, a major risk factor of liver cancer, exhibited a trend similar to that of liver cancer incidence in males, and this trend also differed remarkably by sex.