Liver transplantation for patients with advanced liver cancer dramatically improves survival with a five-year survival of rate of greater than 60 percent compared with nearly zero survival for patients who did not receive a transplant, according to an article in the December 1st print issue of Journal of Clinical Oncology and available online after October 27th.

"This is good news for patients with liver cancer. If diagnosed early, transplantation is the treatment of choice for patients with liver cancer and advanced cirrhosis," said Paul Thuluvath, M.D., lead author of the study. He emphasized that regular screening of patients with cirrhosis, a risk factor for cancer, is necessary to detect cancer early enough to maximize the value of treatment.

In addition to the current favorable five-year survival rate, the investigators found that survival rates after transplantation have increased steadily over the last decade, suggesting that established criteria for patient selection may assist physicians in selecting those patients most likely to respond well to the procedure.

With use of the United Network for Organ Sharing database, the American researchers collected data on 48,887 patients who underwent liver transplantation in the United States between 1987 and 2001. Patients were excluded if they had undergone multiple organ transplantation or retransplantation, were less than 18 years of age, or lacked survival data.

Of the remaining patients included in the final analysis, 985 had liver transplantation for liver cancer and 33,339 patients had liver transplantation for other reasons (the latter considered the control group). Both the liver cancer and control groups were divided into three different five-year time periods: 1987-1991, 1992-1996, and 1997-2001.

Researchers found significant and steady improvement in survival over time among liver transplant patients with liver cancer, especially since 1997. Five-year survival improved from 25.3 percent during 1987-1991 to 47 percent during 1992-1996 and 61.1 percent during 1996-2001.

According to information given in the article, hepatocellular carcinoma is one of the most common cancers in U.S. adults, with more than 1 million new cases diagnosed each year. It is twice as common in men as in women.