Is Liver Transplantation Useful for Late Stage Liver Cancer

Liver transplantation for intermediate and advanced liver cancer is generally ineffective because intermediate and advanced liver cancer may have already developed extrahepatic metastasis or lymph node metastasis. Even if liver transplantation is performed, it cannot eradicate the extrahepatic metastatic cancer cells. Moreover, patients with liver transplantation will use immunosuppressant drugs to fight against immune rejection at the later stage, which will also lead to the rapid growth of extrahepatic spread of liver cancer cells. Liver transplantation is suitable for patients with early stage liver cancer who have decompensated liver function and are not suitable for surgical resection and local ablation. At this stage, liver transplantation is recommended to adopt UCSF criteria, i.e., single tumor diameter ≤6.5cm; number of tumors ≤3, of which the largest tumor diameter ≤4.5cm and the sum of tumor diameters ≤8.0cm; and no large blood vessel invasion. Therefore, it is not recommended to do liver transplantation for patients with intermediate and advanced liver cancer, and it is necessary to standardize the treatment under the guidance of doctors to improve the survival rate.