Placing the needles into the tumors and killing the surrounding tissue by injecting alcohol is one of the liver cancer cure. This technique can be use to treat cancers up to 3 cm in size.
In this liver cancer cure technique, the alcohol is injected through the skin into the tumor using a very thin needle with the help of CT or ultrasound visual guidance.
Alcohol initiates tumor destruction by altering the structure of cellular proteins and drawing water out of tumor cells. This liver cancer cure may take up to five or six sessions of injections to completely destroy the cancer.
The ideal patient for alcohol injection has fewer than three Hepatocellular Carcinoma tumors, each of which is:
- The tumor size is less than 3cm in diameter
- Well defined
- Surrounded by a shell consisting of scar tissue
Patients with HCC undergoing alcohol injection should have no signs of chronic liver failure, such as jaundice ascites. Patients with liver failure would not be able to tolerate the liver cancer cure.
