The most effective way of treating an affected liver has been surgery, which aims to remove all of the visible cancer. Along with the surgery, patients typically receive chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
Unfortunately, in most cases, doctors have been unable to offer patients curative surgery because the cancer is too advanced, there are too many tumors or the tumors are near vital structures.
Now, however, doctors are encouraged by a procedure that is growing in popularity across the country. It’s called radiofrequency ablation (RFA), and it’s being offered to some patients whose tumors have resisted chemotherapy or for whom surgery is not an option. The procedure is minimally invasive and uses electrical energy to literally burn away the tumors.
The procedure has many advantages. First, the surgery is relatively simple. It is typically performed through two small incisions in the abdomen. A special needle is inserted through the skin, and with the help of ultrasound, the doctor can move the needle directly into the tumor and avoid killing large areas of healthy tissue. Once the doctor confirms the needle location on the screen, he then turns on the electrical energy. This heats up the special conducting wires at the tip of the needle and burns the tumor.
The second advantage: It’s much faster than traditional open surgery. Each tumor can take about 30 minutes to treat while the patient is asleep under general anesthesia. Another advantage for the patient: shortened recovery time. Since it’s not a major operation, patients typically spend only one night in the hospital for observation, then are released. Although they experience some residual discomfort at the site of the skin incisions, many people are back to their normal routine within a couple of weeks.
RFA technology isn’t new, but there have been important developments over the last couple of years. Dr. Allan Siperstein, a general surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, recently presented the first significant study of RFA. He analyzed data from hundreds of patients with liver cancer that had spread from the colon. On average, those patients who were treated with RFA and chemotherapy had twice the survival time of those treated with chemotherapy alone. “The idea with this new procedure is not to promise a cure for patients, but to improve the quality and length of life,” Siperstein said. He warns that while effective for many, RFA is considered to be only a local treatment and should be used in patients whose cancer is predominantly in the liver. “We’re able to treat these areas of tumor within the liver,” he says, “but obviously, this has no impact on areas of tumor that may be elsewhere in the body.”
RFA is also being tested in other medical conditions such as cancers of the lung, breast and bone. The hope is that by removing the bulk of the malignant tumors, RFA will give the patients’ organs more time to function normally.
As doctors continue to perfect the procedure and determine how it can best be used in patients with advanced-staged liver cancer, this is at least good news for many suffering from the disease–those who are trying to maintain a normal life in the face of a difficult diagnosis.
