ABSTRACT
Objective:To establish a predictive model of moderate to severe pain in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) undergoing transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE).Methods:264 patients with HCC who underwent TACE operation in Southern Medical University from January 2017 to April 2018 were selected as the modeling set. The pain was assessed by numeric rating scales. The patients were divided into pain group ( n=96) and non-pain group ( n=168) according to whether moderate to severe pain occurred within 24 hours after the operation. Binary Logistic regression analysis were performed for variables that were statistically significant in the univariate analyses. The predictive nomogram was constructed and the internal validation was performed. In addition, 87 patients with HCC who underwent TACE operation from January 2020 to June 2020 were selected as the validation set for external validation. Results:In the modeling set, 96 patients (36.36%) had moderate to severe pain within 24 hours after TACE operation in 264 patients with HCC, and the dosage of morphine intramuscularly injected within 24 hours was 1015 mg, with an average of 10.57 mg per patient. Multivariate Logistic regression analysis showed that preoperative pain, the distance between the tumor and capsule ≤2 cm, high prothrombin activity, dosage of lipiodol>10 ml, and several thromboembolic tumors were independent risk factors for moderate to severe pain after TACE ( P<0.05). Age>50 was the protective factor of moderate to severe pain after TACE ( P<0.05). The area under ROC curve was 0.799 (95% CI: 0.745-0.853) in the modeling set. The area under Roc curve for internal validation and external validation were 0.780 and 0.788, respectively. The calibration curves showed satisfactory agreements between the model predicted probability and the actually observed probability. Conclusion:The predictive model of moderate to severe pain after TACE was established in this study has good differentiation and accuracy, it has certain guiding significance for predicting the high-risk group of moderate to severe pain after TACE operation and formulating the targeted prevention strategy.