Should patients with liver cancer choose interventional treatment or surgical resection? These matters should also be noted in the treatment of liver cancer

Liver cancer is one of the 10 most common and serious malignant tumors in the world, with 260,000 cases each year, 42.5% of which occur in China, and the incidence rate has been on the rise in recent years. Although the early diagnosis rate of liver cancer has improved, it is still mainly in the late stage of clinical diagnosis, and the survival rate of liver cancer patients is still not high. Generally speaking, the traditional treatments for liver cancer include surgery, systemic chemotherapy or radiotherapy. After the 1980s, interventional therapy began to be widely used in the treatment of liver cancer in our country. We have a very deep understanding of this aspect, and the technology is also quite mature.

Although there are still many academic differences in understanding about when and at what stage liver cancer patients should choose interventional treatment, the general trend now should be that interventional treatment should be the first choice for primary liver cancer that cannot be surgically removed. It does not matter whether these patients are in the early, middle or late stages, as long as they cannot be surgically removed, interventional treatment can be performed. Because most scholars believe that liver cancer that can be surgically removed should still be surgically removed. However, many studies in the past have shown that the effect of interventional treatment for small liver cancers is very good, and the five-year survival rate can reach more than 60%. For patients who can be surgically removed, because surgical resection is a radical treatment method, most scholars believe that surgical resection should be the first choice.

Interventional treatment of liver cancer is a minimally invasive treatment using modern high-tech means, that is, under the guidance of medical imaging equipment, special catheters, guide wires and other precision instruments are introduced into the human body to diagnose and locally treat lesions in the body. Most interventional therapies are performed in blood vessels. It does not require surgery, but only requires a small incision less than the size of a grain of rice to insert a thin tube into the blood vessel to treat many diseases that were previously untreatable, required surgical treatment or had poor results with medical treatment.