PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF STUDYING GP73 AS A TUMOR MARKER IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC VIRAL HEPATITIS AND LIVER CIRRHOSIS OF VIRAL ETIOLOGY

Abstract

Around 700,000 cases of verified hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are registered
annually around the world. In terms of frequency of occurrence among cancer diseases,
HCC ranks fifth, and among the causes of death in patients with cancer, it has moved
from third to second place [1, 2, 3]. The incidence rate of HCC per 100 thousand
population in different countries of the world ranges from 1.7 (Northern Europe, Canada)
to 30.0 (China) [4, 5]. In some countries, 6000-8000 new cases of this pathology are
diagnosed annually. Globally, hepatocarcinoma is registered three times more often in
men than in women [6, 7]. Also, there is a significant difference in the prevalence of
HCC among people of different races: Negroids are affected twice as often as Mongoloids,
and Americans are affected twice as often as Hispanics. HCC is most often observed in
patients with liver cirrhosis (LC) of HBV and HCV etiology, as well as in persons who
abuse alcohol and suffer from fatty liver degeneration [8]. Considering that in the early
stage of the disease HCC does not manifest itself clinically, in more than 50% it is
verified very late, often against the background of the development of metastases in
other organs. With early detection of tumor formation, the prognosis of the disease is
relatively good and the five-year survival rate of patients is more than 70% [9, 10]. These
data create the need to conduct research to find new inexpensive and practically accessible
tumor markers for HCC for widespread screening. Particular attention is paid to the
search for tumor markers to identify hepatocarcinoma, which would allow the tumor
to be verified with a sufficiently high probability in the early stages of development,
when instrumental research methods are still uninformative [11]. Considering the above,
the study of new markers in the diagnosis of liver fibrosis/cirrhosis and HCC is one of
the main directions of modern medicine.