Postoperative adjuvant transarterial chemoembolization improves the prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma patients with microvascular invasion: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Microvascular invasion has been widely accepted as a major risk factor of hepatocellular carcinoma prognoses after surgery. It is still controversial whether postoperative adjuvant transarterial chemoembolization could improve the survival of hepatocellular carcinoma patients with microvascular invasion.

To evaluate the effect of postoperative adjuvant transarterial chemoembolization for postoperative hepatocellular carcinoma patients with microvascular invasion.

PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase databases were searched for eligible studies, and the one-, three-, and five-year recurrence rates and overall survival rates were extracted for meta-analysis.

A total of eight studies were included in this study. The results showed that the one-, three-, and five-year recurrence rate of the postoperative adjuvant transarterial chemoembolization group were better than those of the hepatectomy alone group, with a pooled risk ratio (RR) of 0.66 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.58–0.75, P < 0.00001), 0.82 (95% CI 0.76–0.88, P < 0.00001), and 0.89 (95% CI 0.82–0.97, P = 0.007), respectively. The overall survival rates with one-, three-, and five-year pooled RR were 0.34 (95% CI 0.25–0.47, P < 0.00001), 0.69 (95% CI 0.60–0.79, P < 0.00001), and 0.78 (95% CI 0.69–0.89, P = 0.0001), respectively. No serious side effects have been reported, indicating that postoperative intervention is safe.

For hepatocellular carcinoma patients with microvascular invasion confirmed by postoperative pathology, postoperative adjuvant transarterial chemoembolization is a safe treatment, which could reduce the tumor recurrence rate and improve the patient’s overall survival.