Prevention of liver cancer: basic and clinical aspects

Cancer prevention is a challenging project both in the basic and clinical medicine. In particular, prevention of liver cancer is the most urgent task in countries where the incidence of hepatitis virus- related liver cancer is rising. As reviewed in this article, liver cancer is going to be the first cancer that will be actually prevented by primary and secondary interventions. Even the improvement of absolute survival of the patients can be expected by successful prevention, as already demonstrated in a few clinical trials. Thus, prevention of liver cancer is promising to provide not only cost-effectiveness by morbidity reduction but also cost-benefit by mortality improvement.