Hepatocellular carcinoma with central nervous system metastasis: a case report and literature review.

In the United States and western Europe, hepatocellular carcinoma is not generally regarded as a distantly metastasizing tumor. The ability of hepatocellular carcinoma to metastasize to the brain is illustrated by the example of a 65-year-old white American man with no identifiable risk factors for primary liver cancer. Though hepatocellular carcinoma rarely metastasizes to the central nervous system, such metastases are reported to have led to tumor diagnosis or signaled tumor relapse.