AIM:To determine the apoptosis pathway in residualviable hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC) tissues following transarterial embolization(TAE) .METHODS:Ten patients with HCC who received sur-gical resection after TAE were enrolled in the study group,and 24 patients with HCC who received surgical resection only served as the control group. In thestudy group,we measured the changes in tumor sizeand α fetoprotein(AFP) levels after TAE. All tissuesamples were taken from the residual tumors. The ex-pression of various apoptotic proteins was evaluatedvia immunoblotting procedures. The results were ana-lyzed using a Student’s t test.RESULTS:Tumor size and the AFP level decreased by46.2% and 55.3% after TAE,respectively. There wasno significant difference detected for the Bcl-2/Bax ratio or the cleaved caspase-9 expression levels in eithergroup. However,extrinsic apoptopic pathway-relate dexpression of Fas and cleaved caspase-8 expression were significantly higher in the study group than inthe control group(P < 0.05) . In addition,cleaved caspase-3 expression in the study group was higher(1.62-fold) than in control group(P < 0.05) .CONCLUSION:TAE is an effective palliative the rapy that decreases tumor size and AFP levels via an increase in extrinsic apoptosis path way in patients with unresectable HCC. AIM: To determine the apoptosis pathway in residualviable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues following transarterial embolization (TAE) .METHODS: Ten patients with HCC who received sur-gical resection after TAE were enrolled in the study group, and 24 patients with HCC who received In the study group, we measured the changes in tumor size and α fetoprotein (AFP) levels after TAE. All tissues samples were taken from the residual tumors. The ex-pression of various apoptotic proteins was evaluatedvia immunoblotting procedures . The results were ana-lyzed using a Student’s t test .RESULTS: Tumor size and the AFP level decreased 46.2% and 55.3% after TAE, respectively. There was no significant difference detected for the Bcl-2 / Bax ratio or the cleaved However, extrinsic apoptopic pathway-relate dexpression of Fas and cleaved caspase-8 expression were significantly higher in the study group than inthe cont rol group (p <0.05) .In addition, cleaved caspase-3 expression in the study group was higher (1.62-fold) than in control group (P <0.05) .CONCLUSION: TAE is an effective palliative the rapy that decreases tumor size and AFP levels via an increase in extrinsic apoptosis path way in patients with unresectable HCC.