Global treatment pattern variations in HCC

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Published: 4 Jun 2018
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Dr Nahum Mendez-Sanchez - Medica Sur Clinic and Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico

Dr Mendez-Sanchez speaks with ecancer at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting about new treatments of hepatocellular carcinoma and new risk factors for the development of this tumour.

He highlights the rates of obesity and diabetes in Mexico as social factors to inform prevention and screening strategies.

For more on cancer control, watch our interview with Dr Susannah Stanway here.

My talk today was about new treatments of hepatocellular carcinoma, also about the new risk factors for the development of this tumour. I particularly am interested in some chronic liver diseases such as NAFLD, that is non-alcoholic steatohepatitis that is also related with NASH, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, that it can progress to liver cirrhosis and also to hepatocellular carcinoma.

There are some very important risk factors, mainly obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes. As you know, there is a big increase in the prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndrome, especially in this country and in Mexico also we have a very high prevalence – 72% of our population are overweight or are obese and 12% of our population have diabetes mellitus. So those main risk factors are very important to the development of this condition, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, and also develop the hepatocellular carcinoma.

So in the future we have to make some progress in new strategies and screening programmes to identify these kinds of patients and treat opportunely in order to avoid this development of the tumour.