To know the answer in the title, you need to understand two concepts: first, what is advanced liver cancer state? Second, is there any help in the late stage? Only then can the third question be answered: how to treat it?
1. How to understand advanced liver cancer?
Late stage of liver cancer refers to cancer cells larger than 5cm, or multiple lesions in the liver, In addition, lymphatic vessel or lung, adrenal gland, brain and other organ metastasis appeared, or a series of clinical symptoms such as digestive tract bleeding, jaundice, ascites appeared.
2. Is there any cure for advanced liver cancer?
The best treatment for early liver cancer is surgical resection , but because the early symptoms of liver cancer are not obvious, when the patient comes to see a doctor with symptoms such as pain in the liver area, it is already at an advanced stage and surgical resection cannot be performed.
How to treat the late stage? Different patients and different conditions mostly require doctors to “play combined punches” for treatment.
3. How to treat advanced liver cancer?
Treatment used in advanced liver cancer Methods can be divided into the following two categories: interventional therapy and drug therapy.
1. Interventional treatment methods: Inject different substances according to the needs of different conditions.
①Local perfusion of chemotherapy drugs: Using a special catheter, under the guidance of ultrasound equipment, directly inject chemotherapy drugs into the tumor, not only can Directly killing tumor cells, compared with traditional chemotherapeutics reaching liver tumors with the blood circulation of the whole body, can reduce the systemic side effects caused by chemotherapeutics.
② Injection of embolic substances: Similar to the pathogenesis of cerebral infarction, a catheter is used to inject embolic substances that can block the blood supply arteries of the tumor to block the tumor Blood supply, control tumor growth, shrink tumors.
Clinically, chemotherapy drugs and embolic substances are often used in combination, which is also commonly used in patients with advanced liver cancer An interventional operation – “Superselective Transcatheter Arterial Chemoembolization”, or TACE for short.
③ Injection of ablative agent: Under the guidance of B-ultrasound or CT, etc., directly inject chemical ablative agents such as absolute alcohol into the center of the tumor, necrosis of tumor cells.
④Insertion of therapeutic particles:Iodine 125 radiation particles with radiotherapy effect are placed in the appropriate position of the liver and gallbladder, and point-to-point killing is performed to irradiate cancer cells without damaging the liver and gallbladder Surrounding normal human tissue is greatly damaged.
⑤Installation of stents: In patients with advanced liver cancer, for primary liver cancer with portal vein tumor thrombus or biliary obstruction, place stents to expand the obstruction The portal vein or biliary tract can protect the liver function to the greatest extent, making the next step of treatment possible.
⑥Radiofrequency ablation: This is a kind of “burning The specific method for the treatment of “dead” tumor cells is as follows: under the guidance of ultrasound equipment, a special radiofrequency ablation needle is inserted into the liver tumor, and under the interaction of high-frequency current, frictional heat is generated to cause necrosis of liver tumor cells, reaching The purpose of shrinking tumors.
⑦Ultra-low temperature freezing: This is a method of “freezing to death” tumor cells through refrigeration – precise positioning, using argon-helium knife ultra-low temperature to directly Cryoablation of tumor cells.
2. Drug treatment:
< strong>①Chemotherapy: A large number of clinical studies have proved that even systemic chemotherapy has little effect on patients with advanced liver cancer. Moreover, most advanced patients are often accompanied by malnutrition and cannot tolerate a series of side effects brought about by chemotherapy.
②Targeted drugs: According to the different conditions of the patients, choose the appropriate drugs for treatment.
Since it was obtained in 2007 as the first targeted drug for the treatment of liver cancer, Sorafenib The domestic market of targeted drugs such as regorafenib and lenvatinib has opened up a new situation in the treatment of advanced liver cancer.
③Immunotherapy: With the deepening of research, nivolumab, pembrolizumab It was approved for the second-line treatment of advanced liver cancer, which opened the prelude to the era of liver cancer immunotherapy.
More clinical trials have confirmed that single-dose immunotherapy is not effective, but the combined use of anti-angiogenic targeted drugs further improves the efficacy of advanced liver cancer .
④Combined therapy: According to the 2021 edition of “Chinese Expert Consensus on Transformational Therapy of Liver Cancer”:
According to a large number of research results, whether it is bevacizumab combined with atezolizumab, apatinib combined with camrelizumab, or lenvatinib combined with pembrolizumab, etc.< strong>Targeted therapy and immunotherapy combined treatment plan, both have good performance in the treatment of advanced liver cancer, making the conversion therapy of liver cancer more likely to be realized!
Whether it is the combination therapy of targeted drugs plus immune drugs, or The treatment of Vulumab combined with Ipilimumab dual-immune drugs has given patients with advanced liver cancer a new option.
In the past 2021, a study published in the authoritative tumor impurity “Nature Cancer” also proved that the combined use of nivolumab and cabozan Ni, can convert patients with unresectable advanced hepatocellular carcinoma into resectable, making curative surgery possible.
The five-year survival rate of patients with advanced liver cancer after conversion resection can reach 50%-60%. It is almost the same as the five-year survival rate after resection of early liver cancer!
No matter which treatment method is used, for patients with advanced liver cancer, various means can be used to shrink the liver tumor so that it can reach radical resection The purpose of long-term survival is the ultimate goal of treatment!
#How should advanced liver cancer be treated?#