How are bowel cancers different from other cancers when it comes to liver secondaries?
When a breast cancer, for example, causes liver metastases, it is very likely that the cancer cells have gone floating around the entire body, and there are metastases elsewhere too, especially the lungs and the bones. But with bowel cancer, the situation is slightly different. All the blood flowing out of the bowel first goes to the liver via the portal vein. The liver acts as a filter, and is therefore the first, and often the only site of secondary deposits from bowel cancer. It is now well-recognised that surgical removal of the liver metastases from bowel cancer (or to be more precise, colon and rectum cancer) can achieve a cure in a significant proportion of patients. When it comes to other cancers, surgical resection of liver metastases may still have a role to play, but only in a very small proportion of patients.
