Non-Surgical Treatment Boosts Liver Cancer Survival

Ablation therapy uses needle to destroy inoperable tumors

FRIDAY, May 27 (HealthDay News) -- Radiofrequency ablation therapy, a minimally invasive treatment that uses a tiny needle to fry or freeze tumors, is helping extend the survival of patients with inoperable liver cancer, researchers report.

"Currently with the latest chemotherapy treatments, patients with inoperable liver tumors resulting from colorectal cancer have a median survival of 20 months. Our study was designed to see if ablation therapy could improve those survival times," Dr. Perry Shen, assistant professor of surgical oncology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a prepared statement.

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He and his colleagues studied 150 people with liver cancer that had spread from a primary colorectal cancer.

Whenever possible, the patients were treated with surgery. Shen explained that, in some cases, partial removal of the tumor was possible, but the tumor was still classified as "inoperable" because surgeons were unable to remove the total mass. Therefore, patients with inoperable tumors were treated with either ablation therapy alone or a combination of ablation and surgery.

Patients who received surgery alone had median survival of 39 months, compared to 33 months for those who received ablation therapy -- 13 months longer than the 20-month average for those who received just chemotherapy.

The average time to recurrence of liver cancer was 17 months in the surgery group and 11 months in the ablation group.

The study also found that the use of chemotherapy in combination with either surgery or ablation improved overall survival. The patients' overall three-year survival was 51 percent, the researchers found.

"The results of this study show that tumor ablation therapy for inoperable liver metastases from colorectal cancer can extend survival for patients with a poor prognosis," Shen said. "Whether tumor ablation is equal to liver surgery in the long term will require further investigation."

The study was reported at a meeting of the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about treatments for liver cancer (www.cancer.org ).

-- Robert Preidt