The importance of Liver Cancer Screening

One of the goals of our screening programmes is to identify liver cancer early.

There are essentially two types of liver cancer, primary and secondary.

Primary liver cancer

Primary liver cancer usually hepatocellular carcinoma and this is most common form in adults.

There are also cholangiocarcinoma, angiosarcoma, haemangiosarcoma and hepatoblastoma.

Secondary liver cancer

Secondary liver cancer, that is metastatic liver cancer, is when the cancer has spread from elsewhere in the body such as the pancreas, colon, stomach, breast or lung.

Because this has spread this is known as secondary cancer and these tumours are mainly treated based on their primary site.

Secondary liver tumours are much more common than primary liver cancer although this is not true for many areas of Asia and Africa.

By definition secondary liver cancer will have resulted by spread from cancer within other organs and clearly this will be at an advanced stage of the malignant process.

Here at the London General Practice we are screening for primary liver cancers by screening before they are causing symptoms.

It is often hard to find liver cancer early because signs and symptoms often do not appear until it is in its later stage.

Small liver tumours are hard to detect on physical examination because most of the liver is covered by the right ribcage. By the time a tumour can be felt, it might be already too large.