Bile duct cancer, also known as cholangiocarcinoma, is a rare type of cancer that forms in the bile ducts. The bile ducts are a network of tubes that carry bile, a digestive fluid, from the liver and gallbladder to the small intestine. Bile duct cancer is rare in the U.S., but more common in Southeast Asia. It occurs most often in older people.
Bile duct cancer is categorized based on its location:
Bile duct cancer often has nonspecific symptoms, which can make early diagnosis challenging. Symptoms may include:
A risk factor is anything that increases your chance of getting a disease such as cancer. Different cancers have different risk factors. Some risk factors, like smoking, can be changed. Others, like your age or family history, can’t be changed.
But having a risk factor, or even several risk factors does not mean that you will get the disease. And some people who get the disease may have few or no known risk factors. For bile duct cancer, risk factors include:
Treatment options for bile duct cancer depend on several factors such as the location and extent of the cancer, whether the cancer is removable by surgery, the likely side effects of treatment and your overall health. Here are some common treatment options:
Surgery: If the cancer is resectable, meaning the doctor believes it can be removed completely, then potentially curative surgery might be done. If the cancer is unresectable, meaning the cancer is too far advanced, has spread too far or is in too difficult a place to be entirely removed by surgery, then palliative surgery might be done to help relieve or prevent symptoms.
Radiation Therapy: Radiation therapy (also called radiotherapy) is a cancer treatment that uses high doses of radiation to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. Radiation can kill cancer cells as well as regular cells, so the goal of this therapy is to maximize the radiation dose to the cancer cells and minimize the dose to the healthy cells. This treatment option is not often used for bile duct cancer.
Chemotherapy: Chemotherapy (chemo) is treatment with drugs to destroy cancer cells. Chemo may be given after surgery often along with radiation therapy to lower the risk that the cancer will come back or may be used as the main treatment for some advanced cancers.
Targeted Therapy: Targeted therapy drugs work by targeting specific abnormalities within cancer cells. These drugs sometimes work when standard chemo drugs don’t.
Immunotherapy: Immunotherapy is the use of medicines that help a person’s own immune system find and destroy cancer cells. It can be used to treat some people with bile duct cancer.
