Liver Cancer Causes & Risk Factors

Conditions & Diseases: Cancers

Causes and Risk Factors

Medical researchers have not been able to identify the exact causes of liver cancer, but the evidence from clinical trials and medical experience built up over time reveals a strong connection between several risk factors and liver cancer.

Gender: Liver cancer is more common among men.
Age: Liver cancer is more common among patients older than 40.
Harmful habits like smoking, abusive alcohol consumption, and the use of anabolic steroids (male hormones used by athletes to increase their strength). Long-term use of cigarettes, alcohol, or anabolic steroids can increase the risk for liver cancer.
Medical disorders

A) Related to the liver like chronic liver infection with hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus, cirrhosis (a disease that develops when the liver cells are damaged by alcohol, certain drugs or chemicals, certain viruses and parasites, and replaced with scar tissue), liver fluke (an infection caused by a parasite - a kind of flatworm that lives inside of almost any animal and eats the host’s liver), AAT deficiency (is a hereditary defect in body chemistry cause by a deficit of Alpha-antitypic - a protein mostly made by the liver), and tyrosinemia (is a hereditary defect in tyrosine metabolism caused by an enzyme lack; tyrosine is one of the amino acids used by cells to synthesize proteins).

B) Non-related to the liver like obesity, diabetes, and hemochromatosis (a disorder of iron metabolism in which the iron accumulates in tissues).

Exposure to chemicals such as aflatoxin (it is a carcinogen made by a fungus that can contaminate the wheat, peanuts, soybeans, groundnuts, corn, and rice in tropical and subtropical regions), vinyl chloride (a chemical used in manufacturing certain plastics), thorium dioxide (also known as thorotrast is a chemical used in the past for x-ray tests), arsenic (a chemical element used as pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and various alloys) and radium (a chemical element extremely radioactive).

Article by Alina Morrow, MS
Medical Writer
OmniMedicalSearch.com