Aims and background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) ranks third of cancer deaths in China, it kills 100,000 patients every year. In Italy HCC is an increasing malignant tumor and kills about 7000 patients every year. Fortunately, due to a multimodal approach to the treatment of this fatal disease, HCC has been changed from "incurable" to "partly curable". The authors report and comment the methods and the strategies that have been used to increase the cure-rate of HCC.
Methods: The actual approaches, developed in the last thirty years mainly in China, included: screening of cirrhotic patients, early resection, new surgical criteria for cirrhotic liver, early detection of subclinical recurrence and re-resection, multimodality treatment for cytoreduction of huge HCC, sequential resection after cytoreduction of unresectable HCC, targeting therapy using radiolabelled antibodies and lipiodol, transarterial embolization, radiotherapy combined with Chinese herbs, other regional cancer therapy and biological response modifiers.
Results: Are that these methods have reached a marked increase series 5-year survival rate and number of 5-year survivors in more expert institutions.
Conclusions: We conclude that further biological and genetic studies on HCC are warranted and that it is mandatory to perform large clinical randomized trials comparing the more promising treatments.