Abstract: Objective To investigate the efficacy of combination therapy with argon-helium knife cryoablation and transcatheter hepatic arterial chemoembolization (TACE) for upoperable patients with advanced liver cancers. Methods One hundred and forty-four cases of unoperable patients with advanced liver cancers were selected in this study. They were divided into the observation group and the control group by random number table method, with 72 cases in each group. The control group was treated with TACE, and the observation group was treated with argon-helium cryoablation on the basis of TACE. The clinical efficacy, survival rate after treatment and the overall incidence of adverse reactions were compared between these two groups. Results The total effective rate of the observation group was significantly higher than that of the control group (77.78% vs 54.17%, P<0.05). Compared by Log-Rank test the survival rates between these two groups were not significantly different (P>0.05). The total incidence of adverse reactions in the observation group was 12.50%, which has no significant difference when compared with 8.33% in the control group (P>0.05). Conclusion The combination therapy with argon-helium cryoablation and TACE are effective and safety for the treatment of unoperable patients with advanced liver cancers, thus it is worth of clinical application.

Key words: Argon-helium knife cryoablation, Transcatheter hepatic arterial chemoembolization, Unoperable liver cancer