Hepatocellular cancer registry (HeCaRe)

HeCaRe is a multicentre prospective longitudinal study of prognostic factors in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. It currently enrolls 17 centres.

Data collection is ongoing in the individual centres by the participating investigators, the collected data are stored on the platform REDcap. The duration of the study is not limited in time, the first data processing is planned after 5 years of data collection.

The primary objective of the study is to prospectively collect data from patients with hepatocellular cancer patients diagnosed and treated in Slovakia from 2022 onwards.

Main outcomes are:

a) assessment of clinical stage at the time of diagnosis

b) demographics

c) risk factors leading to the development of hepatocellular carcinoma,

d) data on treatment, its effectiveness and monitoring of survival parameters (disease-free survival/progression-free survival, overall
survival).

The secondary objective is to analyse the impact of prognostic factors on survival parameters and treatment response in whole cohort and in subgroups by age and aetiology.
The potential prognostic factors being recorded in the study are:

a) characteristics based on the tumour itself (number of lesions, diameter of the largest lesion, incidence of MAVI and MIVI),

b) prognostic factors arising from the pre-disease depending on the aetiology that led to the malignant transformation ,

c) prognostic inflammatory indices obtained from samples at the time of diagnosis (NLR, PLR, SII), indices documenting nutritional status (PNI).

In addition to prospective data collection, the project includes the opportunity to participate in prospective research on new prognostic factors from blood and stool samples. These will be collected after signing an informed consent, stored according to protocol in
participating centres, and after collecting a sufficient number of samples (minimum number of 100) analysed for new prognostic factors detectable from blood and stool.

For questions please write to Dr. Dominik Šafčák, principal investigator of the project at saffkov(at)gmail.com

Participating centres:

Gastroenterology depaartment - University Hospital Martin,

I. Oncology department, Oncology Institute of St. Elizabeth,

II. Oncology department, National Oncology Institute, a.s.,

Oncology department, University Hospital Trenčín,

Oncology department, University Hospital Trnava,

Radiotherapy and Oncology department, East Slovak Oncological Institute, a.s.,

II. Department of internal medicine and Oncology department, FNsP Banská Bystrica,

Oncology Cluster, Hospital Michalovce,

II. Department of internal medicine, UNLP, Košice,

I. Department of internal medicine of SZU and UNB, Hospital Kramáre,

III. Department of internal medicine of SZU and UNB, Kramáre Hospital,

V. Department of internal medicine of SZU and UNB, Ružinov Hospital,

Internal Department, St. Michael's Hospital - Bratislava,

IV. Department of internal medicine, St. Cyril and Methodius Hospital, UN Bratislava,

Department of internal medicine and Oncology department - University Hospital Nitra

Biobanking substudy