Liver tumors are as numerous as the stars North Glory Yttrium 90 treatment allowed him to reverse the disease in one visit

Liver cancer is the leading cause of broken families, with 4,000 to 6,000 people dying from the disease each year. In the absence of effective treatment, liver cancer can take as little as 4 to 6 months from the onset of symptoms to death.

Although there are many treatment options for liver cancer, traditional treatments are ineffective, and even popular targeted drugs are not as effective in treating liver cancer, and liver tumors are prone to recurrence, making follow-up treatment tricky.

Li Yun-chuan, director of the Department of Abdominal Imaging Medicine at Taipei Veterans General Hospital's Department of Radiology, said, "Yttrium 90 in vivo radiation therapy" can give a high dose of radiation at one time, which can be used to treat patients who have many tumors in the liver or tumors too large to be resected, infiltrating liver cancers, and patients who have failed traditional treatments. For patients with large numbers of unresectable liver tumors, invasive liver cancer, and patients who have failed conventional treatment, Yttrium 90 Internal Radiation Therapy is now an additional tool in the fight against cancer, which can help cancer patients to continue their lives.

"Yttrium 90 microspheres are 40-micron microspheres with radioactive material that are injected into the liver from the femoral artery in the groin," Lee explains, adding that the microspheres stay in the blood vessels supplying nutrients to the liver tumors, and then irradiate the liver tumors with radioactivity for about 2 weeks, killing the tumor cells with high-dose β-rays at a close distance. The yttrium-90 isotope of high-dose radiation is implanted directly into the tumor, which is more effective than traditional external radiation therapy in destroying cancer cells.

It has also been shown in the literature that the use of Yttrium 90 radiation therapy improves tumor response rates by up to 44%, and improves 3-year survival rates from 6% to 17%. Compared to the painful side effects of embolization, the Yttrium 90 procedure is essentially "painless", making it particularly suitable for the elderly who cannot tolerate pain.

Lee cited the example of a 38-year-old man who had tumors on both sides of his liver that were like stars in the sky, and the cancer had invaded the blood vessels, making it impossible to operate.

Not only are liver tumors too large, too numerous, or infiltrative liver cancers that invade blood vessels, but even patients with early-stage liver cancers or patients who have had poor surgical resection or radiofrequency cauterization and recurrence after traditional embolization, failed targeted drugs, or even patients who want to enhance their immune function and receive immunotherapy, can receive yttrium-90 in vivo radiation therapy.

However, Lee emphasized that before yttrium 90 treatment, patients need to undergo a rigorous evaluation of the gatekeeper, including liver function can not be too poor; the other liver tumor volume can not exceed 3/4 of the liver, so as to avoid the liver can not afford the liver failure caused by the liver failure after the operation. It is also necessary to apply another isotope to simulate the treatment situation, so as to avoid the real in vivo yttrium 90 radiation therapy, the back door of the liver vein is open, resulting in radiation damage to the lungs.

Currently, health insurance does not cover yttrium 90 treatment, and the price of the drugs alone for a single treatment can be as high as more than $400,000, which is not affordable for all families. Although it cannot be massively promoted in Taiwan, yttrium 90 is arguably a fairly common treatment in Western countries. In the U.S. alone, for example, up to 10,000 yttrium 90 treatments are given each year. "Because of the high cost of hospitalization in Western countries, yttrium 90 can be discharged from the hospital in one day, which is not necessarily more expensive than embolization, which requires three to four sessions and hospitalization for several days at a time," Lee explained.