Baseball legend Mickey Mantle's chances for long-term survival following a recent liver transplant plunged sharply Tuesday when he revealed that his liver cancer had spread to one of his lungs before surgeons removed the organ.

Although physicians at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas said they were unable to detect any evidence that the tumor had spread before they undertook the transplant operation on June 8, a CT scan taken two weeks ago showed several spots on Mantle's right lung, indicating the cancer indeed had migrated from the liver and taken root in the lung.

Physicians cannot predict how long Mantle, 63, will survive, but in general, a liver tumor that has metastasized to the lung is usually fatal, [Lawrence] Leichman added. Survival in such a case can be "weeks, months or even years," he said, but Leichman said he considers the aggressive nature of Mantle's tumor to be ominous. A metastasis to the lung is usually more deadly than a cancer that originates in the lung because the tumor cells that have spread from elsewhere are scattered throughout the lung instead of being isolated in one spot.