Cancer of the Liver Italian Program (CLIP) score for staging hepatocellular carcinoma.

Aim: To assess the prognostic ability of the Cancer of the Liver Italian Program (CLIP) score in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma after a longer follow up.
Methods: The updated survival data were derived from an analysis that was performed on two joined sets of data. The first set was collected retrospectively in 1995 and was used to perform an exploratory prognostic factor analysis (the CLIP-03 study), that produced the CLIP score. The second set of data was collected prospectively for the CLIP-01 randomized clinical trial.
Results: Out of 912 overall patients, analysis was performed on 650 patients whose records contained all informationregarding prognostic factors. The median survival of the whole group of patients was 17.7 months and the 5-year survival rate was 10.7%. The median survival of the patients was inversely proportional to the CLIP score: the higher the CLIP score the worse the survival.
Conclusions: The CLIP score keeps good prognostic and discriminative abilities after a longer follow up and remains one the most useful prognostic system for hepatocellular carcinoma.