AHPBA/AJCC consensus conference on staging of hepatocellular carcinoma: rationale and overview of the conference

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Abstract
The therapeutic approach to treating patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has changed radically over the past few decades and continues to evolve as the biology and natural history of the disease become better understood and new effective treatment modalities are developed. Modern cancer therapy has evolved so that it can be specifically tailored in the best interests of an individual patient to avoid too much or too little therapy and to provide reasonably predictable outcomes and expectations. Such individualized therapy requires an accurate estimation of prognosis. Accurate prognostication, in turn, depends upon understanding the natural history of the disease for a given tumor stage, as well as the probability of survival in response to a specific therapy. Appropriate selection of individualized cancer therapy for patients with HCC is more complex than for most cancers because prognosis depends not just on the anatomic extent of the disease but also on liver function [ 1 x 1 Okuda, K., Ohtsuki, T., and Obata, H. Natural history of hepatocellular cancer and prognosis in relation to treatment. Study of 850 patients. Cancer. 1985; 56: 918–928 Crossref | PubMed | Scopus (1576) | Google Scholar See all References 1 ]. In fact, liver function is a more powerful predictor of survival as well as response to specific therapy than tumor stage for many patients with HCC.