How long does it take for liver cancer to grow before it has obvious symptoms?

Primary liver cancer (HCC) is one of the most common malignant tumors in China. Because the incidence of HCC is mostly hidden, early HCC usually has no obvious symptoms, which makes it difficult to find HCC in the early stage. Once the typical clinical manifestations appear, it belongs to the middle and advanced HCC. People always think that the course of liver cancer is very short, usually less than 6 months. With the wide application of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) detection and the progress of various localization methods, the detection of 1 ~ 2 cm small hepatocellular carcinoma has made people have a new understanding of the natural course of hepatocellular carcinoma.

Subclinical early stage: from onset to diagnosis of subclinical liver cancer. For example, from the earliest AFP abnormality in the backlog cases, the median time is about 10 months (actually, it may be longer), that is, the time required for the tumor to grow to be detected by the current localization means (i.e. 1 ~ 2 cm). During this period, there was no abnormality except the low concentration of alpha-fetoprotein. Early diagnosis and localization are still difficult. This is the natural course time of symptoms of natural liver cancer, and there are also special circumstances.