Second, the results of this study may not be used for patients with hepatitis C- or alcohol-related HCC as most of patients were hepatitis B-related with cirrhosis.[31] What is more, a study showed other factors such as serum AFP level could serve as a strong predictor of recurrence in HCC.[30] However, these findings were not reported in our study, which could be partly because of different standard of including criteria. Here, AFP is linked to hepatitis C virus infection.