Overall Survival of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients Underwent Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA) Treatment: a Retrospective Cohort Study from Two Referral Hospitals in Indonesia

Background: Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is one of the curative modality therapies commonly used for the early stage of HCC management. Although numerous studies have reported the outcome of RFA around the world, the data regarding the usage of RFA for the early and intermediate stage of HCC remains limited. Hence, the study aimed to report the survival rate of the early and intermediate stage HCC patients who underwent RFA in two tertiary referral hospitals in Jakarta, Indonesia. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted in Cipto Mangunkusumo and Medistra multicenter hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia. The patients with HCC BCLC A and B who underwent RFA treatments between January 2015 to December 2017 were recruited for the study. Baseline characteristics of patients were collected from the medical record. Survival analysis was calculated using the Kaplan Meier. p value result was obtained from the log-rank test. Sub-analysis of factors associated with the survival was also included in this study. Results: There were 62 patients enrolled in this study (32.3% were BCLC A and 67.7% were BCLC B). Forty-six out of 62 patients (74.2%) were reported to have RFA as their first line of treatment, while 12 (25.8%) were reported to have a combination of RFA and other therapy modalities. All these patients were follow-up with an average duration of 27 months. The survival rate of liver cancer due to HCC for 12 and 36 months in patients who received RFA was 82.3% and 57.8%, respectively. Moreover, BCLC staging of liver cancer and response after RFA was significantly associated with survival. Conclusion: RFA still can be used as initial modality therapy nor combination with another therapy for the early and intermediate stage of HCC. BCLC staging and response after RFA had shown to be the independent factors related to survival.