Hepatocellular carcinoma: current trends in worldwide epidemiology, risk factors, diagnosis and therapeutics

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide and, owing to changes in the prevalence of the two major risk factors, hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus, its overall incidence remains alarmingly high in the developing world and is steadily rising across most of the developed world. Early diagnosis remains the key to effective treatment and there have been recent advances in both the diagnosis and therapy of HCC, which have made important impacts on the disease. This review outlines the epidemiological trends, risk factors, diagnostic developments and novel therapeutics for HCC, both in the developing and developed world.

Keywords::

• carcinoma
• diagnosis
• epidemiology
• hepatocellular
• risk factor
• therapeutics

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors are very grateful to the Alan Morement Memorial Fund (Essex, UK), which provided research grants to both Shahid A Khan and Simon D Taylor-Robinson. Work at the Academic Liver Unit at Imperial College London has been supported by the British Medical Research Council and the Engineering, Physics and Science Research Council (EPSRC). The authors are also grateful for infrastructure support from the NIHR Biomedical Research Center funding scheme. Shahid A Khan is also funded by a grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.