الفهرس 
INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALEOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Primary liver cancer is the second leading cause of death, and therefore, it has been raising an ongoing concern over the past few years. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) alone accounts for 90% of all primary liver cancers, affecting approximately half a million individuals annually. The incidence of HCC varies according to patients’ age, gender, and geographic region. HCC is almost the leading malignancy in Egypt, and therefore, it imposes a very high social and medical burden, especially in areas with a high rate of viral hepatitis infection.
The overall prognosis of HCC is generally poor, mostly due to the difficulties of early diagnosis. Therefore, early diagnosis of HCC and subsequent effective treatment can boost patients’ survival and improve their outcomes. Commonly, alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) together with imaging and pathology detection are used for early diagnosis of liver cancer. However, AFP does not give satisfactory results in the early stages of HCC, particularly in AFP-negative HCC. Thus, it has become urgently important to identify new, highly sensitive and specific markers for HCC in order to enhance the early detection rate and improve treatment effects.
Several reports have proposed a valuable role for osteopontin (OPN) as a promising biomarker for early diagnosis of HCC. As a matter of fact, OPN has been suggested to be superior to AFP in differentiating HCC cases from cirrhosis and controls, and such a role needs further investigation. Therefore, we conducted this study in order to evaluate the pattern of OPN in Egyptians HCC patients versus cirrhotic patients.