LIVER CANCER DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT INFORMATION

Is there a test for liver cancer?

• Blood tests
• An MRI scan, CT scan, ultrasound, or other imaging test – Imaging tests create pictures of the inside of the body and can show abnormal growths.
• Biopsy – For this test, a doctor will remove a small sample of tissue from the liver. Another doctor will look at the sample under a microscope to see if it has cancer.

Phương pháp điều trị

Liver cancer can be treated in different ways. Treatment depends on the stage of your cancer. It also depends on how healthy your liver is (in other words, how serious your liver disease was before you got cancer). The different treatments include:

• Surgery – Liver cancer can sometimes be treated with surgery to remove the part of the liver with the cancer.
• Liver transplant – A liver transplant is a type of surgery in which a doctor replaces a diseased liver with a healthy liver from another person.
• Ablation therapy – Ablation therapy is a procedure that can kill cancer cells in the liver. It does not involve surgery. Doctors can do ablation therapy in different ways. They can kill the cancer cells using heat, a laser, radiation therapy, or by injecting a special alcohol directly into the cancer.
• Blocking the cancer's blood supply – Doctors can do a procedure called "embolization" to block off the blood vessel that sends blood to the cancer. This keeps the cancer from growing by "starving" it of its blood supply. Sometimes, the embolization procedure is combined with chemotherapy ("chemoembolization") or radiation ("radioembolization").
• Chemotherapy – Chemotherapy is the medical term for medicines that kill cancer cells or stop them from growing.
• Immunotherapy – This is the term doctors use for medicines that work with the body's infection-fighting system (the "immune system") to stop cancer growth.

If you suspect you have liver cancer, it's important to see your doctor right away so the cause can be found and treated.