Real-world Characteristics, Treatment Patterns Among HCC Patients Receiving Resection or Ablation

Neehar Parikh, MD, MS, and colleagues designed an analysis of demographic and clinical characteristics as well as treatment patterns for patients in the United States with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who received resection or ablation as a proxy for defining early-stage disease.

Results of this analysis are being presented at the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.

While US treatment guidelines for early-stage HCC include liver transplantation, surgical resection, or ablation for small lesions, recurrence rates are up to almost 80% within 5 years of resection. Additionally, current understandings of the early-stage HCC treatment landscape and real-world postrecurrence treatment patterns are lacking.

The retrospective observational cohort analysis included 649 adult patients with HCC who were treated with resection or ablation in the United States between July 2016 and March 2021. Researchers assessed baseline characteristics in the 6-month period prior to index, and patients were followed until the of continuous enrollment in a medical and pharmacy plan, death, or the September 2022 data cutoff.

The median duration of follow-up was 23 months. At index, the mean age was 64.1 years, and the majority of patients were male (72.9%) and Caucasian (65.5%).

Researchers noted that 59.3% of patients (n=385) underwent ablation only, 37.3% of patients (n=242) underwent resection only, and 3.4% of patients (n=22) underwent both procedures.

Transarterial embolization alone was received by 8.8% of patients (n=57). This was the most common embolization procedure received during follow-up, followed by transarterial chemoembolization alone and transarterial radioembolization.

Dr. Parikh and colleagues also found that during follow-up, 13.6% of patients (n=88) received systemic therapies for HCC, including tyrosine kinase inhibitors, PD-1/PD1-PD-L1/cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen 4 inhibitors, or angiogenesis inhibitors.

While acknowledging the limitations of this retrospective observational study with short duration of follow-up, researchers still contend these results “provide a contemporary landscape of early-stage treatments for HCC in the real-world setting.”