ALB and hepatocellular carcinoma: As shown in Table 2, among all the analyzed clinicopathological factors, the serum albumin level was the only one that displayed significant correlation with the deletion spanning the pre-S2 gene segment; pre-S2 mutant-positive HCC patients were significantly associated with a higher proportion of low serum albumin levels (≤3.8 g/dL; 23 of 31 (74%) patients) than that of pre-S2 mutant-negative HCC patients (23 of 44 (52%) patients) (p value = 0.0311).