Yoon et al. Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Korea: an Analysis of the 2015 Korean Nationwide Cancer Registry

To the Editor: On behalf of our coauthors, we write to report serious errors in our article, “Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Korea: an Analysis of the 2015 Korean National Cancer Registry,” published in the first 2021 issue of Journal of Liver Cancer.¹

This article descriptively reports the characteristics of Korean patients who were newly diagnosed with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in 2015 using data from the Korean Primary Liver Cancer Registry (KPLCR). Regrettably, we found critical errors incurred by the misclassification of Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) tumor stage provided from the KPLCR. Specifically, single nodular HCCs with maximal diameter larger than 5 cm were mistakenly classified as BCLC stage B in the original manuscript, although they should have been classified as BCLC stage A. In addition, survival data were also updated during the correction.

The corrections to address these errors are as follows:

● The proportion of BCLC stage A has increased from 26.3% to 31.5% and that of BCLC stage B has decreased from 7.6% to 12.7% to 7.6% (Table 1) after revising BCLC stage.

● The proportions of each initial treatment modality have been corrected (Figure 1).

● Median overall survival and overall survival rates at years 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of respective subgroups were updated (Table 3 and Figure 3).

We hope the medical and scientific community is informed of the results of our reanalysis of the outcomes of our study. We sincerely apologize for these unintentional errors, and considering the extent of the corrections, we have requested that the original article be retracted and replaced. Two additional online supplements containing the original article with the errors highlighted and the corrected article with the corrections highlighted will accompany the replacement article.