In the June issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), researchers report their findings from the first-ever study examining the prognostic value of serum HBV DNA levels for patients with liver cancer undergoing chemotherapy.
They found that patients with high pre-chemotherapy levels of HBV DNA had a significantly increased incidence of severe hepatitis which was associated with the worst survival. The article is also available online at Wiley Interscience (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/hepatology).
HBV is associated with a more than 200-fold increase in risk of liver cancer. In areas where HBV is endemic, like China and the Far East, the great majority of cases of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) occur in individuals with the virus. For most patients whose cancer is inoperable, chemotherapy is one of the main treatment options, and still the prognosis is dismal. Survival is often measured in months.
Researchers, led by Winnie Yeo of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, examined the significance of pre-chemotherapy HBV DNA levels in the blood on the survival of HCC patients. They studied 188 patients participating in a phase III randomized controlled trial comparing two different chemotherapy regimens. One hundred and seventy patients (92 percent) had evidence of HBV infection. Of these, 125 had sera available to determine HBV DNA levels and were included in the study.