Preventive treatment helps avoid Hepatitis B relapse during ch...( A new study on treating hepatitis B pat...),Health

The results of this study appear in the February 2006 issue of Hepatology, the official journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hepatology is available online via Wiley InterScience at http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/hepatology.

Patients who develop hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a type of liver cancer caused by the hepatitis B virus, have up to a 55 percent chance of having the virus reactivated during chemotherapy. The idea of preemptively treating these patients with the antiviral drug lamivudine in order to prevent hepatitis B relapse and it varying complications is promising but has never been investigated in patients with HCC.

Researchers led by Jeong Won Jang of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Catholic University of Korea in Seoul, conducted a prospective randomized study on pretreating HCC patients undergoing chemotherapy with lamivudine between January 2004 and February 2005. The study involved 36 patients with HCC who were given the drug while undergoing transarterial chemo-lipiodolization (TACL) chemotherapy and a control group of 37 patients who underwent the chemotherapy without receiving lamivudine. The chemotherapy was continued every month without any limit on the number of cycles until the tumors disappeared, while treatment with lamivudine began with the chemotherapy and continued for 12 months following its completion.

In total, 43 percent of the patients in the control group developed overall clinical hepatitis during the follow-up period, compared to 17 percent of the patients who took lamivudine. In addition, there was a significantly higher incidence of sever
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Contact: David Greenberg
dgreenbe@wiley.com
201-748-6484
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
1-Feb-2006