Nine-year experience of doxorubicin-eluting beads chemoembolization for hepatocellular carcinoma

BACKGROUND: Chemoembolization with doxorubucin-eluting beads (DEB) has been used to treat hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) since 2007. This study compared the efifcacy and sur-vival between transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) with DEB and conventional approach (cTACE) in HCC treatment.
METHODS: This retrospective case-control study compared the overall survival and tumor response of HCC patients to cTACE (n=190) and DEB (n=143) by the reassessment of com-puted tomography and serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP). Mul-tivariate analysis was used to determine the factors affecting tumor response.
RESULTS: The median post-treatment to pre-treatment AFP level was 0.8 for a DEB session (n=258) and 1.0 for a cTACE session (n=452), showing a signiifcantly greater decrease in AFP after DEB (P<0.05). More patients in the DEB group achieved objective response (complete and partial) compared with those in the cTACE group (P<0.05). Objective tumor re-sponse after DEB vs cTACE was 34.8% vs 15.4% in 0-3 months (P=0.001), 37.1% vs 20.0% in 3-6 months (P<0.05), and 50.0%vs 30.0% in 6-12 months (P=0.093). DEB predicted a 3.604 times odds of achieving at least one objective tumor response in a patient when compared to cTACE (P<0.0001). The median survival from ifrst transcatheter therapy of patients having undergone at least once DEB was 12.53 months, while those having received cTACE only was 10.53 months (P=0.086). A tendency of improved survival appeared to maintain until >80 months after the ifrst TACE session in the DEB group.
CONCLUSION: DEB is a safe alternative to cTACE in HCC pa-tients with better therapeutic efifcacy.