Demographic variations in liver cancer seen in US

Last Updated: 2008-07-09 15:40:07 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The rate of liver cancer, also known as hepatocellular carcinoma, in the United States differs significantly by sex, ethnic group, race and age at diagnosis, according to the results of a study published in the American Journal of Medicine.

The increasing rates of liver cancer, combined with the cancer's high mortality rate, are public health problems, Dr. Robert Wong, of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues report. The current guidelines recommend screening some high-risk patients for liver cancer, but there is little information on how liver cancer rates differ by age, race, or ethnic group in the United States.

The team used data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program, a population-based cancer registry, to examine the specific age, sex, and race variability of liver cancer rates from 1992 to 2004.

A total of 18,442 cases of liver cancer were identified. When the data for males and females were combined, the team found that Asians had nearly twice the rate of white Hispanics (11.0 versus 6.8 per 100,000 persons per year) and more than four times the rate of Caucasians (11.0 versus 2.6 per 100,000 persons per year).

Males had a doubling of liver cancer rates every 10 years from age 30 to 50, according to the authors. Females reached comparable rates 10 to 15 years later and peaked at significantly lower rates compared with men in all racial and ethnic groups, the team found.

The possibility that groups with similar risk factors can have "significantly different disease risk suggests that if screening is effective an individualized approach may more efficiently identify treatable tumors than more general guidelines," Wong's team concludes.

Effective screening may also minimize the number of procedures performed on patients who have a relatively lower risk of progressing to cancer, they add.

SOURCE: American Journal of Medicine, June 2008.

http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2008/07/09/eline/links/20080709elin032.html