GP73 is a resident Golgi-specific membrane protein expressed by biliary epithelial cells in normal liver. A meta-analysis reported that GP73 is a valuable serum marker that seems to be superior to AFP and can be useful in the diagnosis and screening of HCC . However, Tian et al.  indicated that GP73 elevated not only in HCC but also in other chronic liver diseases such as hepatic cirrhosis and hepatitis; even more, the concentration of GP73 in HCC (median = 107.3 μg/L) was significantly lower than hepatic cirrhosis (median = 141.2 μg/L) patients, but their conclusions may suffer from sample selection biases. In our study, followed-up experiments were conducted to assess the dynamic change of the serum markers during the progression of HCC. Our findings further confirm that serum GP73 level was significantly decreased during the progression of HCC. Some research results found that GP73 protein and mRNA expression increase gradually in chronic liver diseases, not only in the hepatocytes, but also in activated stellate cells which are the most important cell type in hepatic cirrhosis [25–27]. Therefore, maximal GP73 concentrations were observed in hepatic cirrhosis rather than in HCC.