Implication of Psoas Muscle Index on Survival for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Undergoing Radiofrequency Ablation Therapy

We aimed to retrospectively examine the impact of pretreatment psoas muscle index (PMI) as determined by computed tomography on survival for treatment naïve hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients who underwent percutaneous radiofrequency ablation (RFA) therapy (n=182; 111 males and 71 females with median age of 70 years). Optimal cut-off points of PMI in male and female were calculated by receiver operating characteristic analysis for survival. We investigated parameters associated with overall survival (OS) in the univariate and multivariate analyses. The median follow-up period in this study was 4.28 years. For all cases, the 5-year cumulative OS rate after initial RFA was 69.2%. The median (range) value in PMI for male was 6.03 (1.63-9.90) cm /m whereas that for female was 4.06 (1.21-7.32) cm /m . Maximum tumor size ranged from 0.7 cm to 3.5 cm (median, 1.5cm). There were 145 patients with single nodule and 37 with multiple nodules. The optimal cut-off point for PMI was 6.31 cm /m in male and 3.91 cm /m in female. The 5-year cumulative OS rates were 51.5% in the decreased PMI group (n=90) and 86.5% in the non-decreased PMI group (n=92) (