Long-term outcomes and prognosis for patients with sarcomatoid hepatocellular carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Characterized by spindle cell composition in hepatocellular carcinoma tumor, sarcomatoid hepatocellular carcinoma (SHC) is a rare malignant with poor prognosis. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the clinical and pathological features of SHC and establish a nomogram that can predict long-term outcomes of the disease. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed 63 patients who were diagnosed with SHC between October 2007 and November 2016 and used immunohistochemistry (IHC) to assessed various markers in liver samples. The clinical data and the histological and pathological findings were collected and used to build a nomogram to predict survival. RESULTS: The median overall survival (OS) and the recurrence-free survival (RFS) in SHC were 23.2 and 8.4 months, respectively. High expression levels of tyrosine-protein kinase Met (17/63, 27.0%) were associated with poorer RFS (P=0.040). A panel of markers, consisting heat-shock protein 70 (HSP70), glutamine synthetase (GS), and glypican-3 (GPC3), merged as an independent risk factor for treatment outcomes. The nomogram, which including this panel of markers, predicted OS times with a concordance-index (C-index) score of 0.758 (95% CI: 0.672–0.843) in the training set and 0.832 (95% CI: 0.712–0.952) in the validation set. The use of the nomogram showed marked improvements in the prediction of patient outcomes compared with conventional staging systems (P<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Diagnosis of SHC is rare and has a relatively poor prognosis. A panel of markers HSP70, GS and GPC3 served as an independent prognostic factor for SHC.