AFP and hepatocellular carcinoma: Although AFP levels greater than 400 ng/ml are considered diagnostic of HCC as well as a marker of bad prognosis marker (Bialecki and di Bisceglie, 2005), it is not recommended to use AFP as a sole marker for HCC surveillance (Hanif et al., 2022) and the combination with other blood-based biomarkers is suggested to improve HCC diagnosis (Wang and Zhang, 2020).