Background: Assessment of disease activity is important in the management of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. Our objective was to study the correlation between serum HBV DNA levels and HBV e antigen (HBeAg) status, alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels, histologic activity, age and sex in patients who had chronic HBV, with emphasis on those who were HBeAg negative with high replication but had normal or below-normal liver enzyme levels and mild liver disease.
Method: At our university-affiliated tertiary care medical centre in Turkey, we studied prospectively 179 consecutive patients who were long-term hepatitis B surface antigen carriers. These patients were first separated into 2 groups according to HBeAg positivity and then subdivided into 4 groups according to the presence of HBV DNA, HBeAg status and ALT levels. The clinical, virologic and histologic differences in these patients were evaluated with respect to the HBeAg status.
Results: Of the 179 patients, 120 (67%) were HBeAg positive and 59 (33%) were HBeAg negative. The mean (and standard deviation) age in the former group was 24.8 (7.60) and in the latter group was 32.2 (11.2) years (p < 0.001). HBeAg-negative patients had significantly more severe liver disease, more male predominance and lower serum HBV DNA levels than HBeAg-positive patients (p < 0.05). HBeAg status had a close correlation with age. There was a significant correlation between age and serum HBV DNA levels but not between HBV DNA levels and disease activity in study groups. We found that some of anti-HBe-positive patients had below-normal ALT levels with minimal or absent histologic changes despite high viral replication.
Conclusions: Monitoring of ALT is of value in assessing hepatocellular damage in patients with chronic hepatitis B virus infection. HBeAg-negative patients with elevated ALT levels and some with normal ALT levels should be considered highly infectious in the course of chronic HBV infection.