By: Lee Hui Chieh

A TRIAL is underway to find out if two treatments work better than one for liver cancer patients, whose tumours cannot be removed through surgery.

More than four in five liver cancer patients fall into this group, because their cancer is often too advanced by the time they are diagnosed for them to undergo surgery, the best treatment method.

They usually undergo one of three other methods, or nothing at all.

The National Cancer Centre (NCC) in Singapore and other hospitals in the region that are also part of a liver cancer research network, the Asia-Pacific Hepatocellular Carcinoma Trials Group, will be using two of the methods together on 31 such patients.

One treatment, a pill called sorafenib, extends the patient?s life by about three months, but does not shrink the tumour.

The other, a procedure that implants a tiny radioactive particle into the tumour, shrinks the tumour.

Each year, an average of 393 people here are diagnosed with the disease each year, and 390 of them die.