Challenges of Clinical Research on Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Abstract

Challenges of clinical practice and research on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were reviewed. There are several differences in clinical practice between Japan and the Western countries such as tumor markers, understanding of pathological early HCC, imaging diagnosis, treatment strategy, staging system and subclassification of HCC. Further studies are warranted for the clinical practices of Japan to be adopted in the rest of the world.

STAT1-induced regulation of lncRNA ZFPM2-AS1 predicts poor prognosis and contributes to hepatocellular carcinoma progression via the miR-653/GOLM1 axis

“…There are many studies showing the possible risk factors involved in the canceration of liver and evidences from China and Southeast Asia indicate that viral hepatitis B and cirrhosis are most common events in tumor incidence 2,3 . Although a large number of financial resources have been devoted to the studies of curative treatments targeting HCC, which has resulted in continual advancements in HCC in the past few decades, the long-term survival time of HCC patients remains relatively poor 4,5 . One of the important reasons for the poor clinical outcome is that many patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage, which was highly associated with metastasis of HCC cells 6 .…”

Long non-coding RNA SNHG22 facilitates hepatocellular carcinoma tumorigenesis and angiogenesis via DNA methylation of microRNA miR-16-5p

“…In the past few decades, massive financial resources were put into the research of therapeutic methods for HCC, which led to continuous progress in HCC treatment [ 4 ]. However, it remains relatively poor in the clinical outcome of HCC patients [ 5 ]. One reason is that a lot of patients are usually definitely diagnosed at the later stage that correlated with metastasis [ 6 ].…”