Ethnicity and hepatocellular carcinoma risk factors in New Mexico: A retrospective analysis over a 12-year period.
269 Background: Common hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk factors, such as hepatitis C virus (HCV) and hepatitis B virus infections, heavy exposure to alcohol and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), vary in relation to gender, ethnicity, and geographic regions. New Mexico (NM) has the highest adjusted risk ratio of 1.27 for HCC when compared with other US geographic regions. The population of Hispanic Whites (HW), non-Hispanic Whites (NHW) and American Indians (AI) in NM provides a unique opportunity to study the prevalence of the known HCC risk factors among different ethnicities. Methods: We identified about 550 patients who were diagnosed and/or received treatment for HCC at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Hospital and the UNM Cancer Center from 2003 to 2015, using ICD 9/10 codes. Following approval by institutional review board, a retrospective chart review was conducted to correlate the known HCC risk factors and ethnicity of patients. This is a preliminary report of the findings in a randomly selected 226 of the 550 patients, and we expect to complete the analysis by the time of the GI ASCO symposium. A logistic regression with pairwise comparison was conducted to determine the distribution of the HCC risk factors among different ethnicities. Results: Among NHW, HCV is the most prevalent risk factor for HCC. AI have lower proportion of HCV infection, compared to NHW (35% vs 74%; P= 0.0008). However, DM and NASH were more frequently observed among AI than NHW, 54% vs 27% and 27% vs 9% ( P= 0.025 and 0.038) respectively. Table 1: Proportion of HCV, diabetes, NASH among AI, NHW and HW and pairwise comparison between ethnic groups. Conclusions: Among AI, the major risk factors for HCC seem diabetes mellitus and NASH. However, among NHW, chronic HCV infection is the most prevalent risk factor for HCC.[Table: see text]