A Trial of Adjuvant Transarterial Chemoembolization (TACE) for Preventing Tumor Recurrence After Liver Resection

Although resection of hepatocellular carcinoma is potentially curative, local recurrence is common with the recurrence rate higher than 50% during 5 years. So to reduce the recurrence rate of HCC, some interventions had been tried in clinic, including transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), immunotherapy, and interferon treatment etc. But few of these adjuvant therapies had been proved effective and their long term efficacy and clinical application remained further explored.

TACE had been prove to be effective in patients with advanced stage of HCC in randomized controlled trials and meta-analysis, but the role of adjuvant TACE after liver resection is controversial. The results getting from different randomized control trials varied significantly because of the bias of patient selection, different study design，the small size of sample, different drug used in chemotherapy and lack of proper stratification…,so a big sample size, well patients selected and well designed randomized controlled trial is needed to further confirm the role of the postoperative TACE.

Patients with HCC who received curative liver resection (R0) were randomly assigned 1:1 by the doctors to receive no adjuvant TACE(control group) or TACE(treatment group). All patients in the treatment group received adjuvant TACE 45 days after liver resection. The outcomes of patients were evaluated during the 3-years follow up.