What is palliative care?
The word palliative is derived from the English word “palliative.
The word palliative comes from the English word “palliative”, which means soothing, relieving.
According to the World Health Organization, palliative care is defined as active holistic care for patients who do not respond to curative treatment, with active interventions for pain and other physical, psychological, and spiritual problems to relieve the patient’s suffering.
What does palliative care for hepatocellular carcinoma involve?
The concept of palliative care for hepatocellular carcinoma is relative to “cure” and includes not only the management of symptoms and complications (e.g., nausea and vomiting, pain, malnutrition, intestinal obstruction, bone metastases) but also palliative interventions, palliative radiotherapy, palliative chemotherapy, palliative targeted therapy, and immunotherapy. The aim is to alleviate patient suffering and extend patient survival as long as possible.
Palliative interventions
Mainly transcatheter arterial chemo embolization (TACE), in which the blood supply to the tumor is blocked while a high concentration of chemotherapeutic agents is locally concentrated in the tumor to exert a tumor-killing effect.
Palliative radiotherapy
Local treatment can be administered not only for intrahepatic tumor lesions (especially portal vascular cancer thrombi) but also for bone metastases to relieve bone pain.
Palliative chemotherapy
The chemotherapy drugs serve to control systemic tumors, and the standard oxaliplatin-containing regimen currently recommended by our liver cancer guidelines has relatively few side effects and is well tolerated by patients.
Palliative targeted therapy
Sorafenib is the only targeted agent currently approved for marketing in China. 2017, the FDA s approval to market the new targeted drugs regorafenib and lenvatinib may bring benefits to more patients in the future.
Immunotherapy
A hot treatment modality in antitumor therapy in the last 5 years, the use of PD-1 antibody in liver cancer is still in clinical trials in China.