Dear @thegiver25,
The earlier (younger) you start NUC therapy, the lower the risk for HCC. I do not think that this article should cause you any anxiety.
HCC is caused at least in part, by copies of the HBV genome integrating into host chromosomes. This means that liver cancer can form even without having liver disease (e.g. cirrhosis).
By slowing / stopping viral replication, the integration process is also slowed, which lowers the risk for HCC.
I am 33 years and I do not know when I was infected until this year in May and I started the treatment since. I have stopped drinking alcohol too trying to exercise here and there
All things in your favor!
Took a very deep breath when you mentioned
" king of virus ". Literally meaning it has no solutions what ever efforts scientists put in??.
Before I got diagnosed of HBV, I grew up knowing HIV has the most deadly virus on planet earth but ever since then, I have learnt Hbv the worst salient killer virus
Dear @Opa,
Yes HBV is the “king” of the viruses in terms of how it has evolved to evade / prevent immune control. However, HIV is also highly evolved to evade immune function because it hides in immune cells and also has ways of scrambling the sugars on its envelope proteins so immune control is also very difficult to achieve.
So with HBV and HIV we are at the the same stage of therapy - well tolerated drugs which control replication and active disease well but must be taken like long.
BUT:
Don’t forget that 75-80% of the 2 billion or so people who have been infected by HBV globally have won the battle with HBsAg and established functional cure (resolution of acute HBV) - these people don’t ever need to take therapy. So we know that this can be done. Its just that efficient removal of HBsAg is key to functional cure in patients with chronic HBV. This is not so easy.
We have seen this accomplished fairly easily in those rare (unicorn) patients with HBsAg < 1000 IU/mL with pegIFN (functional cure rate ~30%) and in patients with genotype A. The challenge is how to do this with patients with typical HBsAg loads (~10,000 IU/mL) and in all all genotypes.
NAPs have already been shown to do this: our latest clinical trial has demonstrated 58% functional cure present after 5 years of no-therapy. Others are also trying to target HBsAg as well.
A true sterilizing cure is not possible in HBV but functional cure is (which has essentially the exact same clinical benefit). Take heart…