Hepatocellular adenoma subtypes: the impact of overweight and obesity.

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular adenomas (HCA) are rare benign tumours occurring mainly in women using oral contraceptives. With the appearance of a generation of new oral contraceptives, the number of HCA cases was anticipated to decrease, but in fact this was not observed in our practice. The influence of obesity was therefore suspected as a new co-factor.

AIMS: The aim of this study was to analyze the impact of overweight/obesity in our cohort of HCA patients classified according to their subtypes.

RESULTS: The number of HCA noticeably increased faster in the 2001-2011 period compared to the 1990-2000 period. This phenomenon concurred with an increasing number of patients overweight or obese. Females still represented the great majority of overweight/obese patients presenting HCA, however, overweight/obese male patients constituted a new entity in the inflammatory HCA and β-catenin activated- inflammatory HCA subgroups.

CONCLUSION: We propose that overweight/obesity may soon represent a major risk of malignant transformation of HCA, possibly via the IL-6 pathway.