Jaundice in liver cancer patients is not always advanced

  Many people think that once jaundice appears in liver cancer patients, they have reached the advanced stage of liver cancer and have no more surgical value. However, Professor Liu Chao of the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University found that the fact is not so absolute, some patients with early stage liver cancer may also develop jaundice, which is clinically called jaundiced liver cancer, but it is easily misdiagnosed as biliary stones and biliary liver cancer.  Mr. Shi began to have heart pain in April this year, and was treated according to stomach disease for more than 2 months, but the pain was not relieved. In June this year, he began to develop jaundice and was diagnosed with biliary stones in a hospital, where repeated bile duct extraction was performed but never retrieved. he was diagnosed with early jaundice liver cancer in November. After surgery, Mr. Shi recovered and was discharged from the hospital and is doing well.  Liu Chao said that jaundice in advanced liver cancer is due to the cancer being so large that it compresses the bold duct or destroys the bile duct and forms a cancer embolus in the bile duct, making it impossible for bile to stay out, thus forming obstructive jaundice. In jaundiceable liver cancer, the tumor itself is not necessarily large, but invades the small bile ducts earlier. Due to the small size of the tumor, it is easily missed or misdiagnosed as a stone when ultrasound is performed. If this type of liver cancer can be diagnosed early, the surgical result is similar to other early liver cancers.  The incidence of jaundiced liver cancer accounts for about 10 percent of all liver cancers, but many of these patients are misdiagnosed, Liu said. Some doctors find jaundice in liver cancer patients and arbitrarily assume that treatment is impossible, while some patients are treated repeatedly as jaundiced hepatitis or bile duct stones, delaying treatment.