The Favorable Impact of Hepatitis B Core Antibody Positive Grafts on Liver Transplantation for Hepatitis B Virus-related Hepatocellular Carcinoma: a Nationwide Multicenter Retrospective Cohort Study

This retrospective observational study included patients who underwent liver transplantation between January 2015 and December 2020 from 8 transplant centers in China, including the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Shulan (Hangzhou) Hospital, the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, HuaShan Hospital of Fudan University, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital of Capital Medical University, and the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University. Demographic and clinicopathological data of these patients were extracted from the prospectively maintained China Liver Transplant Registry (CLTR) database. The exclusion criteria were as follows: (1) re-transplantation, combined organ transplantation or living donor liver transplantation; (2) intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma or combined hepatocellular-cholangiocarcinoma; (3) HBsAg positive graft; and (4) missing of baseline data. Patients who were lost to follow-up were also excluded.

Statistical analysis was performed with GraphPad Prism (Version 9), IBM SPSS Statistics (Version 26) and R version 4.3.1 (R Foundation). Regarding the initial demographic data, continuous variables were depicted as medians (IQR: Inter-Quartile Range) and analyzed for differences with the Mann-Whitney U test. Categorical variables were contrasted through the application of the chi-squared test. Cumulative patient survival, graft survival, recurrence-free survival and recurrence rate were analyzed by the Kaplan-Meier method and compared with the log-rank test. To lessen the impact of potential confounders and selection bias, propensity score matching (PSM) was implemented to form comparable groups. Unbalanced variables were entered into the 1:1 matching model. Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the relationship between variables and the event of interest. Univariate analyses were performed to identify the potential risk factors for patient survival, graft survival and recurrence-free survival in each group. Variables (P<0.10) were included in the backward stepwise multivariate analyses.