Your liver is a football-sized organ on the right side of your belly, just below your ribs. It helps you digest food and makes substances that help your body work.
What is liver cancer?
There are 2 kinds of liver cancer:
Primary liver cancer: Cancer that started in your liver
Metastatic liver cancer: Cancer that started in another organ and spread (metastasized) to your liver
The most common primary liver cancer in adults is:
Hepatocellular carcinoma (hepatoma)
Other types of primary liver cancer are uncommon or rare.
Metastatic liver cancer is more common than primary liver cancer. Many cancers can spread (metastasize) to the liver. The most common ones are cancers of the colon, breast, lung, and pancreas.
If not treated, liver cancers grow and spread and keep the liver from functioning normally. Cancers that start in other organs and spread to the liver are treated differently from primary liver cancers.
View of the Liver and Gallbladder
What causes liver cancer?
What are the symptoms of liver cancer?
At first, liver cancer may cause no symptoms, but later you can:
Lose weight
Not feel hungry
Feel weak and tired
Other symptoms may include:
Jaundice (when your skin and the whites of your eyes look yellow)
Uncomfortable feeling in your belly
Swollen belly
Nausea and vomiting
Many other health problems have the same kinds of symptoms.
How can doctors tell if I have liver cancer?
Doctors may do:
Blood tests
Imaging tests of your belly, such as ultrasound, CT (computed tomography) scan, or MRI (magnetic resonance imaging)
Liver biopsy (putting a needle through your skin into your liver to take out a small piece of tissue to look at under a microscope)
Surgery to remove a bigger piece of tissue to examine
How do doctors treat liver cancer?
Primary liver cancer
If the cancer is found early, doctors may remove the cancer with surgery. Much less often, they take out the whole liver and replace it with healthy liver from another person (liver transplantation).
Other treatments for primary liver cancer include:
Medicines
Heating or freezing the tumor with probes passed through the skin into the tumor
Injecting medicines or alcohol into the tumor
Targeting powerful x-rays at the tumor (radiation therapy)
Liver cancer is often found after it has grown and spread, and sometimes these treatments don’t work well. In such cases, medicines and other treatments are given to relieve pain and other symptoms.
Metastatic liver cancer
It doesn't usually help to do surgery to remove metastatic liver cancer. Your doctor will likely recommend chemotherapy. The chemotherapy is usually given in your veins (IV). Sometimes the doctor will put a long tube up an artery in your leg and into your liver. That tube can deliver chemotherapy right to the tumor.
How can I prevent liver cancer?
You can lower the risk of getting primary liver cancer by:
Getting tested for hepatitis B and C and taking medicine to treat it
Not drinking too much alcohol
Watching your weight
If you have hepatitis B or C or a lot of scarring in the liver (cirrhosis), your doctor may do blood tests and ultrasound to check for liver cancer even if you have no symptoms.
