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Clinical effectiveness of surgical treatment after lenvatinib administration for hepatocellular carcinoma

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Abstract

Background

There is little evidence concerning survival after surgery in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who have received lenvatinib treatment. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether post-lenvatinib surgical treatment in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma improves overall survival.

Methods

The cohort of this retrospective study comprised 55 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who had undergone lenvatinib treatment. We classified them into two groups according to post-lenvatinib surgical treatment status and compared clinicopathologic factors and prognosis between the two groups with the aim of identifying predictors of overall survival.

Results

The median duration of lenvatinib administration was 5.8 months (range, 0.4–24.0 months). Twelve of the 55 patients underwent surgery after receiving lenvatinib. There was no significant difference in assessed clinicopathological factors between patients who did and did not undergo surgery after being treated with lenvatinib. Multivariate analysis revealed that older age was associated with a significantly worse overall survival (hazard ratio: 2.332; 95% confidence interval 1.062–5.168; P = 0.0369) and that surgery after treatment with lenvatinib achieved better overall survival than other forms of treatment (hazard ratio: 0.121; 95% confidence interval 0.016–0.901; P = 0.0393).

Conclusions

Surgical treatment after lenvatinib administration may be a useful therapeutic option for select patients with hepatocellular carcinoma.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Trish Reynolds, MBBS, FRACP, from Edanz (https://jp.edanz.com/ac) for editing a draft of this manuscript.

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from JSPS KAKENHI (Number JP-19K09198). The funding source had no role in the collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data, or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Surgery and Science, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kyushu University, 3-1-1 Maidashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, 812-8582, Japan

    Shinji Itoh, Katsuya Toshida, Kazutoyo Morita, Takeshi Kurihara, Yoshihiro Nagao, Takahiro Tomino, Takeo Toshima, Noboru Harada & Tomoharu Yoshizumi

  2. Tokai University School of Medicine, Isehara, Japan

    Masaki Mori

Authors
  1. Shinji Itoh
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  2. Katsuya Toshida
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  3. Kazutoyo Morita
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  4. Takeshi Kurihara
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  5. Yoshihiro Nagao
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  6. Takahiro Tomino
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  7. Takeo Toshima
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  8. Noboru Harada
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  9. Masaki Mori
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  10. Tomoharu Yoshizumi
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Contributions

SI participated in the study conception, design, acquisition of data, analysis, interpretation of data, and drafting of the manuscript. KT, KM, TK, YN, TT, TT, and NH participated in the acquisition of data. MM and TY participated in critical revision of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shinji Itoh.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare no conflicts of interests regarding this article.

Ethical statements

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board Ethics committee, National Research Committee, and the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments. The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board (No. 2021–468). Informed consent was obtained for all treatments from all participants.

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Itoh, S., Toshida, K., Morita, K. et al. Clinical effectiveness of surgical treatment after lenvatinib administration for hepatocellular carcinoma. Int J Clin Oncol 27, 1725–1732 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10147-022-02229-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10147-022-02229-2

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