The efficacy of surgery in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma: a cohort study

It is still controversial whether hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with lymph node invasion should receive surgery treatment. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of surgery (liver resection and local tumor destruction treatments) in HCC patients with regional lymph node metastasis.

The study utilized data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results-18 (SEER-18) cancer registry. Patients for whom the treatment type was not clear or those with distant metastasis or without regional lymph nodule invasion were excluded. For survival analysis, patients with the survival months coded as 0 and 999 were excluded. All 1434 patients were included in the analysis. Among them, 168 patients were treated surgically and the other 1266 received non-surgery therapy. Propensity score matching (PSM) model was used to reduce selection bias.

Before PSM, the median overall survival (mOS) and median cancer-specific survival (mCSS) of patients treated surgically were longer than that of receiving non-surgery treatment (mOS 20 months, 95% CI 15.3-24.7 vs. 7 months, 95% CI 6.4-7.6, P < 0.001; mCSS 21 months, 95% CI 115.5-26.5 vs. 6 months, 95% CI 5.3-6.7, P < 0.001). Subgroup analysis found no significant differences in mOS and mCSS between liver resection and non-liver resection surgery cohorts (P = 0.886 and P = 0.813, respectively). Similar results were obtained in the PSM analysis. The mOS and mCSS in the surgery group were longer than those in the non-surgery group (mOS 20 months vs. 7 months, P < 0.001; mCSS 20 months vs. 6 months, P < 0.001). The multivariate analysis documented that surgery was an independent predictor for OS and CSS before and after PSM.

HCC patients with invasion of regional lymph nodules may get more survival benefit from surgery than other types of treatment.