Are patients with Child's A cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma appropriate candidates for liver transplantation?

We aimed to estimate the survival benefit derived from transplantation in patients with stage II hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and Child's A cirrhosis, defined as the mean lifetime with transplantation minus the mean lifetime with treatments other than transplantation. We calculated the posttransplantation survival of all adult, first-time, deceased-donor, liver transplant recipients in the United States since the introduction of the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease based priority system in February 2002 (n = 36,791). We estimated the posttreatment survival of patients with Child's A cirrhosis and stage II HCC treated by radiofrequency ablation (RFA) ± transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) or surgical resection by conducting a systematic review of the medical literature. In patients with Child's A cirrhosis and stage II HCC, the estimated median survival benefit of liver transplantation compared to RFA ± TACE was 1.5 months at 3 years (range -3.5 to 5.6) and 5.7 months at 5 years (range 0.7-11.4), whereas compared to surgical resection it was 0.7 months at 3 years (range -2.9 to 3) and 2.8 months at 5 years (range -4.4 to 5.7). Liver transplantation in patients with stage II HCC and Child's A cirrhosis results in a very low survival benefit and may not constitute optimal use of scarce liver donor organs.