Profile of patients with well-differentiated and moderately or poorly differentiated HCC.

CI, confidence interval; HCC, hepatocellular carcinoma; *p value by Wilcoxon rank-sum test; †p value by the chi-square test. Missing cases of gender, missing adjacent non-cancerous liver samples, or hepatitis virus-positive cases carrying both HBs Ag and HCV Ab were excluded from statistical analysis using the chi-square test. ‡“B” denotes the cases with HBsAg-positive, “BC” denotes both HBsAg and HCV Ab-positive, “C” denotes HCV Ab-positive, and “NBNC” denotes the cases with both negative, respectively. All non-cancerous liver of HBV or HCV-positive cases was revealed as chronic hepatitis or liver cirrhosis according to the histological examination. §“non-LC” denotes background liver without cirrhosis and “LC” denotes liver cirrhosis. The presence of LC was determined by histological examination [12]. Child-Pugh classification represented the background liver function.