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Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) — whose incidence has doubled in the U.S. during the past 2 decades — is usually diagnosed at a late stage, precluding potentially curative interventions such as liver transplantation (JW Gastroenterol Jan 5 2007). In efforts to identify HCC at an earlier stage, practitioners have advocated greater HCC surveillance among high-risk patients. However, small studies have shown that rates of screening were very low among patients who received HCC diagnoses.
To further evaluate HCC surveillance rates, investigators used Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) and Medicare data to study a cohort of 1873 cirrhotic patients (age, >65; mean age, 74.9) who received diagnoses of HCC during 1994–2002. The resear…