Treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma: too many options?

PURPOSE: This study attempts to review the therapeutic interventions being used to treat patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
DESIGN: An English language literature search, including abstracts and original articles, and a review of the bibliographies of such articles, was conducted.
RESULTS: Surgery is possible in few patients and curative in only a small percentage. Conventional chemotherapy is ineffective in HCC. Modifications of chemotherapy, including intraarterial infusion, chemoembolization, lipiodol, styrene-maleic acid-neocarzinostatin (SMANCS), and isolated hepatic perfusion, have led to improved tumor responses, but have not materially affected patient outcome. Radioimmunotherapy and conformal radiotherapy have had no more than a marginal impact on patient outcome. Surgical innovations such as cryosurgery and percutaneous alcohol injection have not yet been shown to offer any advantage, and liver transplantation, while curative in some patients, requires an enormous expenditure of resources to achieve cure in few patients.
CONCLUSION: Prevention is the ideal approach to HCC. Surgical cure is rarely possible, and while numerous therapies may palliate symptoms, patient selection and the lack of randomized studies make their impact on median survival difficult to assess. Patients being treated for HCC should be enrolled on treatment protocols testing multimodality or new strategies.