What are the treatments for liver cancer? Introduction to the treatments for liver cancer

Liver cancer is a highly malignant, invasive and metastatic cancer, and surgery is the first choice for treatment. However, most patients are already in the middle and late stages when they seek medical treatment and can only receive non-surgical treatments such as interventional therapy, ablation, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy.

Iron chelators can combine with iron ions in the human body and be excreted with urine. Injecting iron chelators can effectively reduce the concentration of iron ions in the body. Because iron ions are an important raw material in the development of tumor tissues such as liver cancer, a decrease in the concentration of iron ions in the body has a certain therapeutic effect on liver cancer.

Scientists say that current clinical trials show that iron removal may become a new treatment for liver cancer. However, due to the high risk of losing iron ions in the body, Japanese scientists believe that more experimental data is still needed to accurately use this method.

So what are the treatments for liver cancer?

Early liver cancer

Early treatment is an important factor in improving the prognosis of liver cancer. The treatment of early liver cancer is mainly surgical resection. If the resection is thorough, the patient has the possibility of long-term survival. However, liver cancer surgery will cause damage to the patient's body tissues and loss of Qi and blood, making the patient's physical condition weak, which is prone to cancer recurrence, spread and metastasis of cancer cells. If you can cooperate with traditional Chinese medicine treatment in time after surgical treatment, strengthen the body, improve the patient's diet and sleep conditions, and enhance the patient's physical fitness, it will be of great benefit to preventing the recurrence and metastasis of cancer.

Advanced liver cancer

Most of the middle and late stage liver cancers have already spread and metastasized, and the chances of surgical resection are low. Even if surgery is performed, it is only a palliative local resection. Clinically, the treatment methods for middle and late stage liver cancer mainly include radiotherapy, chemotherapy and traditional Chinese medicine treatment, and the principle of treatment is to combine traditional Chinese and Western medicine. Chemotherapy is one of the commonly used methods for non-surgical treatment of liver cancer, but it has serious shortcomings such as "fighting foes and enemies" (cancer cells and normal cells are killed together), the effective dose and the toxic dose are very close (a small dose is ineffective, and a large dose is prone to toxic reactions), and toxic side effects. Among them, the most obvious reactions are impaired digestive function and suppressed bone marrow hematopoietic function, which often make it difficult for liver cancer patients to accept chemotherapy or unable to complete the entire course of treatment due to severe reactions.

Therefore, Chinese medicine treatments such as strengthening the spleen and stomach, replenishing qi and blood, and nourishing the liver and kidneys should be combined with chemotherapy and after chemotherapy, which can better alleviate chemotherapy reactions and help chemotherapy proceed smoothly. Radiotherapy is suitable for liver cancer patients whose tumors are small but cannot be removed. There are also obvious radiotherapy reactions in liver cancer radiotherapy, which forces many patients to interrupt radiotherapy. If Chinese medicine treatments such as replenishing qi and blood are combined during and after radiotherapy, it will have a good effect on increasing the number of white blood cells and enhancing immune function, thereby ensuring the smooth progress of radiotherapy.

In short, liver cancer treatment includes surgical resection, hepatic artery interventional therapy, chemotherapy, etc. However, less than 20% of patients can undergo surgery, and even for those who undergo surgery, the 5-year recurrence rate is relatively high, exceeding 60%; chemotherapy is effective for patients in the middle and late stages, and local chemotherapy with interventional therapy is more common, that is, injecting drugs into the hepatic artery; after the advent of new chemotherapy drugs in recent years, systemic chemotherapy containing oxaliplatin has been found to have a good control effect on tumors through clinical studies in China, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Thailand.