[Dion]

Originally Posted by wooohooo

So the news came back that it is stage 1 liver cancer. The size is about a grape, so hopefully signs are okay. They'll do a MRI and then meet with a liver cancer specialist. Fingers crossed... fingers crossed...

They caught it early which is good news.

The current strategy in liver transplantation embraces this philosophy, that is:

To identify patients who have early stage tumors and then promptly list them for transplantation so that they could be transplanted before the disease progresses within the liver, and decrease the likelihood of it spreading to other locations outside the liver.

For that reason, patients who have cirrhosis and are considered to be at high risk for development of hepatocellular cancer; specifically those with Hepatitis B, C, hemachromatosis, alpha 1-antitripsin deficiency, and any patient with cirrhosis are screened on a regular basis in order to identify tumors at an early stage before they have progressed to a stage where a patient is no longer transplantable for cure.

At this point it seems that it is likely that patients with stage 1, 2 and even stage 3 tumors can be cured with liver transplantation provided that the surveillance and detection of spread of the disease within the liver is accurate and confined at those early stages.

http://www.usclivercancer.org/livertransplantation.html