LATEBREAKER
Cancer
Multimarkers of metabolic vulnerability and inflammation and risk for metabolic-associated liver cancer Ampem Darko Siaw* Samuel Antwi Ampem Darko Siaw Nicholas Johnson
Background: Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is a rapidly growing public health problem, and a leading cause of liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC) in the U.S. and many parts of the world. Given the rising incidence of MASLD and the potential for many patients to progress to HCC, there is a pressing need to identify biological markers of disease progression to enable patient risk stratification and early intervention. We performed a pilot study assessing associations between three multimarker indexes; metabolic vulnerability index (MVX), metabolic malnutrition index (MMX) and inflammation index (INFX), and risk for HCC development.
Methods: A nested case-control study was performed among 52 MASLD-HCC cases and 52 MASLD controls, individually matched on age, sex, race/ethnicity, date of MASLD diagnosis, date of sample collection, and length of follow-up. Baseline, pre-malignant samples were used to measure plasma biomarkers simultaneously using nuclear magnetic resonance MetaboProfile (e.g., valine, leucine, isoleucine, citrate, high-density lipoproteins, etc.), and then aggregated into MVX, MMX, and INFX scores. These indexes were treated as continuous variables and logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusting for age, sex, race, body mass index, type II diabetes, and smoking history.
Results: Higher MVX (OR=1.06, 95% CI: 1.02-1.10) and INFX (OR=1.05, CI: 1.02-1.09) scores were associated with higher risk for HCC. No association was found between MMX and HCC risk (OR=1.04: 95% CI: 0.99-1.10).
Conclusion: These findings suggest that elevated multimarker index scores for metabolic vulnerability and inflammation contribute to HCC development in MASLD patients. These indexes could be integrated with other clinical information and genetic markers for HCC risk prediction in the setting of metabolic abnormalities.