Is interventional treatment for liver cancer effective? Precautions for interventional treatment for liver cancer

About 344,000 people die of liver cancer in my country each year, accounting for 55% of the world's liver cancer deaths. Compared with the high mortality rate, the detection rate of early liver cancer is relatively low. Only 1/4 of liver cancer patients have early small liver cancers. Due to the hidden onset and difficulty in early diagnosis, most of them have reached the local advanced stage or distant metastasis when diagnosed.

Even with surgical resection, recurrence and metastasis are common. In the past, we were worried about cancer recurrence after surgical resection, so we used intensive or impact chemotherapy, concentrated radiotherapy and other means together, hoping to control the tumor and prevent recurrence. However, the opposite happened, and recurrence and metastasis of liver cancer still occurred inevitably. For tumor treatment, sometimes it is very important to choose a good treatment method.

Due to the low rate of early detection, only 20-30% of people are suitable for surgical removal of the tumor or ablation to kill the entire tumor. Patients who lose the chance of radical cure are mostly because the tumor is large, has invaded the blood vessels, and has unclear boundaries, making it impossible to cut it cleanly. At this time, multidisciplinary comprehensive treatment is needed to find ways to allow patients to survive with the tumor. This situation has become more and more common, and many patients who survive with tumors have survived for more than 5 years. This has become a trend in liver cancer treatment.

The World Health Organization regards cancer as a chronic disease because it takes time to develop, cannot be cured, and exists for life, just like diabetes and high blood pressure. Only by looking at this issue rationally can we accept the concept of "coexisting with cancer."

Secondly, "living with cancer" does not mean no treatment. For cancer patients, as long as surgical resection or other treatments can cure the disease, active treatment must be given.

Again, for patients who cannot undergo surgery, doctors can also take other effective treatments to prolong the patient's life and improve his or her survival status. For example, patients with advanced liver cancer can also undergo interventional treatment.

Interventional therapy has the best effect on liver cancer (for patients who cannot undergo surgery, interventional therapy is currently one of the most mature and effective treatment methods in palliative treatment). 80% of liver cancer patients have no better treatment methods, but interventional therapy can do a good job. Before interventional therapy, the one-year survival rate of liver cancer would not exceed 10%. More than 90% of liver cancer patients would hardly survive for more than one year. On the contrary, after more than 20 years of interventional therapy, a large amount of clinical data shows that regardless of the stage of primary liver cancer, all liver cancers added together, including advanced liver cancer, the overall one-year survival rate, regardless of early or advanced stages, is about 80% to 85% for one year, about 40% for two years, about 18% for three years, and about 7% for five years. Of course, the effect of interventional therapy for small liver cancer is outstanding, and its treatment effect can even be comparable to that of surgery. Although there is still a certain gap between this and the patient's requirements, from a medical perspective, we believe that this has been a big step forward in the treatment of liver cancer.