Aggressive surgical resection using cardiopulmonary bypass and deep hypothermic circulatory arrest can successfully rescue patients with advanced HCC and right atrial tumor thrombi from impending heart failure.
May support surgical rescue in select HCC cases with atrial thrombi; leaves open need for prospective validation before practice change.
Tumor in the right atrium creates a life-threatening condition and should be removed immediately. A cirrhotic patient who had recurrent hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) over remnant liver with tumor thrombi extending to inferior vena cava (IVC) and right atrium presented with impending congestive heart failure. The recurrent tumor and its thrombi were successfully resected en-bloc using cardiopulmonary bypass and hypothermic circulatory arrest. Although the patient's disease-free and actual survival time were only 6 months and 14 months, respectively, he was rescued from heart failure. This aggressive surgical strategy creates further possibility to treat such advanced HCC cases. Further investigations regarding adjuvant therapies in these circumstances, however, are necessary.
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Wu et al. (2000) studied this question.
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