Liver cancer statistics

Japan has the highest rate of liver cancer in any industrialised country, and the annual death rate of 32 000 is expected to rise over the next 10 years, according to a report by the Japan Society of Hepatology.

Primary cancer of the liver (hepatocellular carcinoma), which is nearly always the result of long term damage through either infection with hepatitis B or C or alcoholism, accounts for 95% of all cases of the disease in Japan, but it is considered a relatively rare malignancy in the West.

The society's report found that 90% of patient with liver cancer in Japan develop the disease as a result of infection with either the hepatitis B or C virus; western Japan accounts for a greater number of patients and deaths than eastern Japan.

Men tend to get the disease more often than women. In 1993, 23 931 cases were diagnosed in men and 8957 in women. Among men, liver cancer is the second most common cause of deaths from cancer; among women it is the fourth.

Dr Hideaki Tsukuma, of the Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases, carried out research in Osaka which found that rates of liver cancer were highest among people, especially men, born during the years 1931 to 1935.

"Illegal intravenous drug abuse--amphetamine addiction--was endemic in Japan just after the second world war. Since the 1930s generation was around 20 years old at the end of the second world war, I suppose this generation had a big chance of abusing illegal drugs and [becoming infected] with the hepatitis C virus.

"The spread of hepatitis C infection from those drug abusers to the general population was likely to occur through medical practices, commercial blood banks, and so on," he said.

Liver cancer takes 30 years or more to develop after infection. The number of cases of liver cancer began to increase in 1975, and reached a virtual plateau between 1990 and 1993, Dr Tsukuma said.