What are the early symptoms of liver cancer? What is the best treatment for liver cancer?

What are the symptoms of liver cancer? Everyone must have heard of liver cancer. People are terrified when they hear about this disease. In addition, the incidence of liver cancer has increased year by year in recent years. Many people have begun to pay attention to liver cancer. Many people have asked about the symptoms of liver cancer and the treatment methods of liver cancer. The following is some knowledge about liver cancer.

What are the symptoms of liver cancer? The most common and obvious symptoms of liver cancer are weight loss, lower limb edema, fever, etc.:

1. Obvious weight loss

Patients will experience problems such as indigestion, which will lead to a decrease in appetite, which will easily cause them to lose weight and develop symptoms such as emaciation and fatigue. In addition to reasons such as a decrease in appetite, they may also suffer from decreased liver function and hindered metabolism, leading to a decrease in digestion and absorption function.

2. Lower limb edema

Patients with liver cancer and ascites often have lower limb edema, which may occur at the ankles in mild cases and spread to the entire lower limbs in severe cases. Clinically, some patients have severe lower limb edema, with fluid oozing out of the thigh skin. The main cause of lower limb edema is ascites compressing the lower limb veins or cancer thrombus blocking them, which obstructs venous return.

3. Fever

It is relatively common, mostly with persistent low-grade fever, around 37.5-38℃, or irregular or intermittent, persistent or remittent high fever, similar to liver abscess, but without chills before fever, and antibiotic treatment is ineffective. Fever is mostly cancer fever, related to the absorption of tumor necrosis; sometimes it can cause cholangitis due to compression or invasion of the bile duct by cancer, or fever due to reduced resistance combined with other infections.

4. Pain in the liver area

The most common symptom of liver cancer is right upper abdominal pain. It is often intermittent or persistent dull pain, or bloating pain, which worsens as the disease progresses. The location of pain is closely related to the location of the lesion. If the lesion is located in the right lobe of the liver, it is right hypochondrium pain, and if it is located in the left lobe of the liver, it is subxiphoid pain. If the tumor invades the diaphragm, the pain may radiate to the right shoulder or right back. A tumor growing to the right back may cause right waist pain.

What are the treatments for liver cancer?

1. Surgical treatment: For patients with a clear diagnosis of liver cancer, a small tumor area, the possibility of resection, good liver function compensation, normal prothrombin time, good general condition, no other serious organic diseases, and the ability to tolerate surgery, radical surgical treatment should be sought as much as possible.

2. Chemotherapy: Systemic chemotherapy, mostly administered intravenously; intraoperative portal vein or hepatic artery chemotherapy pump placement, regular chemotherapy, can help reduce tumor recurrence. But in general, chemotherapy alone has many side effects and poor efficacy.

3. Radiotherapy: Radiotherapy can control tumor development, shrink tumors, and reduce tumor recurrence, and has achieved good clinical results. Although radiotherapy for liver cancer alone has a certain effect on advanced liver cancer, in general, the effect is not good.

4. Comprehensive treatment: Most liver cancers seen in clinic have entered the middle and late stages, and about 80% of liver cancer patients have liver cirrhosis. Only a few can be radically resected, and most liver cancers rely on comprehensive treatment. Comprehensive treatment is the basic principle for treating middle and late stage liver cancer. The first step is to use appropriate non-surgical local treatments to kill a large number of cancer cells, which is the core of comprehensive treatment.