Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth common cancer in the world, showing the third highest cancer related mortality. The prognosis of HCC patients depends not only on tumor stage but also on the background liver function reservoir. Effective treatments for HCC include percutaneous ablation, surgical resection and liver transplantation. Although short-term prognosis of HCC patients has been much improved recently due to advances in early diagnosis and treatment, long-term prognosis is as yet far from satisfactory as indicated by the overall survival at 10 years after apparently curative treatment of only 22%-35%.
Primary prevention aims to evade the tumor development with health measures that prevent people from exposure to known risk factors like hepatitis viruses or alcohol, or attenuating liver disease progression to HCC. While secondary prevention aims to diagnose HCC at an early, potentially curable stage, tertiary prevention aims to reduce the risk of HCC recurrence after curative treatment. In this article we focus on prevention of HCC and the new advance in this field.
Long-term prognosis and management of hepatocellular carcinoma after curative treatment
