Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma and Treatment

Advanced hepatocellular carcinoma has had few new improvements in the last 10 years, with encouraging results in the past year.

The treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) follows well established guidelines. For patients who are not candidates for curative treatments, the oral multikinase inhibitor sorafenib is the only systemic treatment that has shown improvement in overall survival. Since 2007, sorafenib is the standard of care for the first-line reatment of advanced HCC patients, being, in general, well tolerated, with a manageable toxicity profile. The most common drug-related adverse events are diarrhea, hand-foot skin reactions, fatigue, rash and anorexia.