ALB and inflammatory response: Potential explanations might be as follows: (1) HCC is a classical inflammation-related cancer, which is often progressed from hepatitis-cirrhosis [4, 32], and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin are confirmed to be able to reduce the risk of morbidity and mortality of HCC [33, 34]; (2) the role of nutrition status is tended to be more and more important in the prognosis of cancer, especially in advanced cancers, and as a direct index of nutrition status, ALB is only synthesized in liver [15, 35, 36].