Risk stratification for hepatocellular cancer among patients with cirrhosis using a hepatic fat polygenic risk score.

Background: Polygenic risk scores (PRS) hold the promise to refine prognostication in hepatocellular cancer (HCC). The few available HCC PRS include germline risk variants identified among individuals of mostly European ancestry, but data are lacking on the transportability of these PRS in multiethnic U.S patients with cirrhosis from multiple etiologies.
Methods: We used data from 1644 patients with cirrhosis enrolled in two prospective cohort studies in the U.S. Patients were followed until HCC diagnosis, death, liver transplantation, or last study visit through June 30, 2021. The high-risk variants in PNPLA3-MBOAT7-TM6SF2-GCKR were combined in a PRS and we evaluated its association with HCC. Discriminatory accuracy was assessed using the C-statistic.
Results: During 4,759 person-years of follow-up, 93 patients developed HCC. Mean age was 59.8 years, 68.6% were male, 27.2% Hispanic, 25.1% non-Hispanic Black, 25.7% had NAFLD, 42.1% had heavy alcohol use, and 19.5% had active HCV. HCC risk increased by 134% per unit increase in PRS (HR = 2.30; 95% CI, 1.35-3.92). Compared to cirrhosis patients in the lowest tertile of the PRS, those in the highest tertile had 2-fold higher risk of HCC (HR = 2.05; 95% CI, 1.22-3.44). The PRS alone had modest discriminatory ability (C-statistic = 0.58; 95% CI, 0.52-0.63); however, adding PRS to a predictive model with traditional HCC risk factors had a C-statistic of 0.70 (95% CI, 0.64-0.76), increasing from 0.68 without the PRS (p = 0.0012).
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that PRS may enhance risk prediction for HCC in contemporary U.S. cirrhosis patients.
Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Dr. Singal consults for Genentech, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eisai, Exelixis, BMS, Exact Sciences, Fujifilm Medical Sciences, Glycotest, and GRAIL. Dr. Marrero consults for Glycotest. Dr. Loo advises Gilead. All other authors declare no conflicts of interest.
(Copyright: © 2023 Thrift et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)